How Should You Write?

Recently, one of my old school friends has also started a blog. They write far more articulately and elegantly than I do, and I’m very jealous of their well-honed grasp on the English language (although admittedly I do feel like the fact they did a degree in English Literature constitutes cheating). However, reading their posts does require a fair bit of effort, and I inevitably have to look up some words on the way. If I wasn’t a native speaker or highly fluent in English, I would really struggle to extract any meaning from it at all, which made me wonder what the point of writing in this way is. Language should be about conveying ideas and meaning, and precision is important in this, but past a certain point, is a writer merely showing off? It’s one thing to write a novel in such a way that the words have a certain kind of beauty, even if that beauty is hand-in-hand with complexity, but I think it’s another thing entirely to write an indie folk album review in that manner.

If you can get your point across just as well, using longer, less well-known words in a blog post like this isn’t serving the reader and is potentially excluding them - all it is serving is the writer’s ego. So, maybe it is time to keep things simple on the blog.