Torgeir wrote Robert wrote that he is "depressed and frustrated by the disappearance of plain speech and writing among young people," but that he "can think of no way of bringing it back." I am sorry that you feel that way. I also like those who speak plain, like when I want to buy a sandwich and the proprietor plainly tells the price without any jokes, innuendos or tricks. This also applies to writing (not a sign saying what the price/might/ be, say). When my interlocutor is convoluted I can get otiose. Anyway, though, I like to think that kids write a lot/more/ these days than they used to, and they write more stuff closer to their/vernacular/. I believe that is a good thing when it aids in articulating needs and demands for people. *I'm not sure how to think about that; I'm not sure how much more they write or in what contexts they write it. My experience as a teacher of philosophy and of the history, art, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome---considering how far back that experience goes---would lead me to think that the amount they write for academic purposes has not changed much. Whether they write more 'outside of class,' I don't know, but my hunch would be they don't. (I have no clear sense of how much writing they do for 'social media,' like Facebook, or whether what they write in these forums counts as writing.) Of course, a highly specialized and sadly underdemanded writing skill as is practiced in analyitcal philosophy is possibly less accentuated isa result or due to some third determinind variable. I don't know. And I don't know if it was better when kids could write perfectly legible letters of application but were unable to describe subjective explosions of joy celebration oppression hopes etc *First of all, I don't consider myself working in 'analytic philosophy' (a field which few could define, although they claim to recognize it when they see it); but in any event, my longing for clear expression and plain writing would extend to attempts to describe emotions and feelings: there's no reason why these, these attempts, should relegated (or elevated) to a different/kind/ of expression, although the vocabulary in which they're expressed may be lots different from the categories and limitations of the old Logical Positivists, e.g. *We expect good poets to write clearly, and not to claim immunity from doing so because, simply because, they're poets. Thank you, Torgeir, for stimulating these incoherent thoughts. Robert Paul