Long AND clear?
(Originally a Risks forum posting, 1998.)
Although complaints about Microsoft Word’s eagerness to correct what it sees as mistakes are not new in the Risks forum, I think it is still useful to protest vehemently the way recent versions of Word promote the dumbing down of English writing by flagging (at least when you use their default options) any sentence that, according to some mysterious criterion, it deems too long, even if the sentence is made of several comma- or semicolon-separated clauses, and even though it is perfectly obvious to anyone, fan of Proust or not, that clarity is not a direct function of length, since it is just as easy to write obscurely with short sentences as with longish ones and, conversely, quite possible to produce an absolutely limpid sentence that is very, very long.
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