Apologies; my own writing style is influenced by reading a lot of eighteenth-century text, which tends to be very wordy, but which also seems to express a much

Apologies; my own writing style is influenced by reading a lot of eighteenth-century text, which tends to be very wordy, but which also seems to express a much higher precision of thought than the more terse modern fashions of writing. I've noticed that Pitarou's advice on rephrasing my original reply would reduce it to something much vaguer than I'd intended, and would simply convey the conclusion of my thought process as a simple yes-or-no response, leaving my actual rationale entirely hidden. I'm not entirely convinced that we've necessarily gone downhill in terms of literacy or mental capacity, but I agree that the outward expressiveness of language certainly has declined in comparison to the past, and this may be in part an explanation for the coarseness and contentiousness of much modern discourse.