So someone wrote a good, brief article on how to become a better writer.
Most of the advice is good (and I, for example, could learn to be pithier). But I’m not sure I can take all this advice. I mean, for example, when I want to critique Krugman or DeLong for portraying Hoover as a liquidationist by quoting Hoover’s memoirs selectively, I suppose I could say “they lie!” – which, in a sense, they are. However nothing they say is technically untrue so really I can’t eschew* the use of words like “tendentious” and “mendacious” or “tendentiously mendacious,” or “mendaciously tendentious.” Of course, if I were bold enough, I’d just go full Frankfurt on these cretins.
*heh. (Of course, yes, it is true that the proper response to someone who says or writes “eschew” is “gesundheit,” or maybe “God bless you.”)
