I totally agree with what the author is saying. Some writers, whether political or scholarly, feel the need to write this way because the audience that they are trying to reach need to be pushed to a perceived higher level. However, it has the opposite effect. If a piece is too challenging, it will not be finished and the intended reader is no more informed than they were before they attempted to read the piece.
I have often wondered why some authors choose to write this way. Is it because we are constantly told that we are behind the world as far as academics are concerned? Or could it be a way of increasing the distance between the college educated and the ones who are not? Or even worse still, a way to enforce classicism and racism? And it's not just in the form of politics or academics. Big business rely on this type of covert language as well. So does the law.
The most successful writer is one that reaches the most through his thoughts and ideas and not through his thesaurus.
I love the end of your post and I completely agree. Sometimes I think that writers, whether political academic, lawyers, or simply authors write in the same style as the text they read. I know that when I read a book that was written in the 16th hundreds my mind beings to adopt that style of writing and I will go back and read what I wrote and laugh. It makes me feel exactly like the example Orwell gave about the Politician speaking and resembling a robot. It is not the way I speak nor the way I write. But anyways the point I was trying to get to was the fact that lawyers or politicians read the same kind of texts that they read. It's almost like a never ending circle.
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