Azzam To'meh

“There’s the kind of boneheaded explanation, which is that a lot of people with PhDs are stupid, and like many stupid people, they associate complexity with intelligence. And therefore they get brainwashed into making their stuff more complicated than it needs to be. I think the smarter thing to say is that in many tight, insular communities—where membership is partly based on intelligence, proficiency, and being able to speak the language of the discipline—pieces of writing become as much or more about presenting one’s own qualifications for inclusion in the group than transmission of meaning. And that’s how in disciplines like academia—or, I’ve read some really good legal prose, but when it’s really, really horrible (IRS Code stuff)—I think that very often it stems from insecurity and that people feel that unless they can mimic the particular jargon and style of their peers, they won’t be taken seriously, and their ideas won’t be taken seriously. It’s a guess.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“My main deficit, at least in terms of nonfiction prose, is I have difficulty of being as clear as I want to be. I have various tricks for working around that and making it kind of charming to watch somebody trying to be clear, but the fact of the matter is, I can’t be clear and compressed in the way that, say, parts of the preface of your dictionary that I liked very much are clear and compressed.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“But you overuse the passive voice, you‘re distorting the normal order of the sentences. You’re filling it up, often with prepositions or with forms of the verb to be, which is one of the ways that writing gets flabbed out. And you’re dehumanizing the writing because there’s no agent. Right?. So it immediately becomes more abstract, so the reader’s eyes glaze over quickly.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“It’s also true that we go through cycles. Right? At least in terms of my own work, I’ve gone through three or four of these, and I’m in one now, where it feels as if I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever known. I have no idea what to do. Most of what I want to do seems to me like I’ve done it before. It seems stupid. And except on the days I’m really depressed, I realize that I’ve been through these before. These are actually good—one’s being larval. I’m being larval, right? Or else, I just can’t do this anymore, in which case I’ll find something else to do. And I brood about that a fair amount. But I think the hard thing to distinguish among my friends is who . . . who’s the 45-year-old who doesn’t know what she likes or what she wants to do? Is she immature? Or is she somebody who’s getting reborn over and over and over again? In a way, that’s rather cool.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way