Earlier this fall a headline in The Atlantic caught my eye. “The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing,” it said. Promising enough on its own, but there was also a subhead: “A new movement strives ...

If you’re like most people, the amount of time you spend in teleconferences has skyrocketed over the past months. So too has the amount of time you spend writing emails. Sales pitches. Proposals.

Favoring active sentences over passive ones is probably the most repeated advice regarding clarity and concision. An active sentence is one where the subject is the source of the action. Conversely, a ...