This is something that needs to be read when fully awake and, probably, with a dictionary nearby! I admit that I gave up with the opening spiel quite quickly --

This is something that needs to be read when fully awake and, probably, with a dictionary nearby! I admit that I gave up with the opening spiel quite quickly -- I'll have another go later -- and skipped to "The Rules"; many of which I don't necessarily agree with, but perhaps I'm too mired in technical writing. (I have a feeling they'd give the Plain English Campaign people a heart attack!) There are some gems in there, though. This superluminary rant made my morning, for example: 18. All these vapidly doctrinaire injunctions—urging you to write only plain declarative sentences stripped of modifiers and composed solely of words familiar to the average ten-year-old and demanding that you always prefer charcoal-gray to sumptuous purple—are expressions of everything spiritually deadening about late modernity and its banausic values. They reflect an epoch in which the mysterious, the evocative, and the beautifully elliptical have been systematically suppressed and nearly extinguished in the name of the efficient, the practical, the mechanical, and the starkly unambiguous—in short, in the name of everything that makes existence uninviting and life boring. They are reflections of an age of bloodless capitalist economism, the reign of brutally common sense, the barbarian triumph of function over form, a spare, Spartan civic architecture of featureless glass and steel and plastic, a consumerist society that lives on the ceaseless production and disposal of intrinsically graceless conveniences. Learn to detest all of these things and you will be a better writer for having done so. Take his 19th rule to heart and read the above out aloud. You won't regret it.