Final report on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in-flight exit door plug separation

At school (Polish class in Poland) we were always taught to prefer complex and compound sentences over simple ones, because it's more elegant and speaks well the speaker/writer.

Same happening in Hispanic school systems could explain the sentences in some of the Spanish Wikipedia articles.

It doesn't, though. It's pretentious and educated people will see through it. If the goal is to inform, then you should do the opposite.

Well that’s one source (of many) where the problem is coming from.

i imagine the language may change that though. With Polish having nominally 300k-400k words compared to English's >1m, i'd guess that it's a lot easier to misdirect and fluff up your writing in English.

This sentence isn't written for elegance but for meaning. The formal cause of the accident was the mechanical separation, but that happened for a reason, either mechanical failure (which means a failure in the engineering of the aircraft, which would have to be remedied by new engineering processes) or an assembly failure (which would have to be remedied by new assembly processes). In one sentence, the author drills down to exactly what went wrong that enabled the accident to happen. Identifying that is the first step to remedying it.

Only if you're using technical writing in a situation where you shouldn't be.

Problem is the state of most English education doesn't even teach enough for people to recognize proper unambiguous technical writing, let alone appreciate it or attempt to compose it.

Could've been worse. In Korean schools they somehow find the worst, most meandering and pointless examples of English prose and shove them at poor students at exam time to test their "English comprehension" skills, when any reasonable native speaker would've said "Who the fuck writes like this?"

English has over 1 million words? No way. Except for pronunciation, it is relatively simple language.

It's not pretentious and there's nothing to see through here. This is the preferred style in Poland and it's widely used, especially by the educated people. Just because the sentences aren't simple, doesn't mean they're not informative.

Also, we were taught to prefer compound and complex sentences over simple ones where applicable, not at all costs. For instance, the quoted sentence from NTSB report is a bit too long in my opinion.

It can if you count all the different forms of each word and proper nouns. But this way Polish may have even more words than english, given multitude of different forms. I've never checked that, though.

There's also the tendency in English to make new words out of existing ones to create new meanings, while in Polish we often use multiple separate existing words to create new meanings.

All in all, I believe English has more base forms than Polish.

It has words of both Germanic and Latin origin, that's why it has so many. The fancy words are usually the Latin ones.

You could write the same thing using multiple sentences no problem, without affecting the meaning.

What problem? To make sentences like the one from NTSB report quoted here? Well, personally I would've split it and I'm pretty sure my teacher would've asked me to do it too if I were the author. ;)

I remember an anecdote from my English teacher where a student went to London, and a taxi driver told her (the student) something along "What a lovely English! It's a shame nobody speaks like that anymore." ;)

That's true for fusional languages. English isn't one.

The problem of writing to look smart rather than communicate vital information.

How come? A more fusional language is one where a single word can carry more forms of information where English would need more words (e.g. "my book"). This isn't directly related to how much information you should put in a sentence. OTOH, all languages are recursive which means you can construct arbitrarily long sentences - but you shouldn't, because human cognition has its limits.

In my experience as a speaker of a more fusional language, the sentences are shorter than in English, not longer.

"a complex writing style preferred by educated people" - how is that not pretentious?

You started by saying complex sentences should always be preferred, but now you ended by saying "only where applicable" and the sentence under discussion was "too long".

> "a complex writing style preferred by educated people"

This is not a quote of me. Nor is it an honest summary of what I wrote. It also completely ignores the context: the "educated people" were supposed to "see through" - the same people who predominantly prefer the same style. I have also never claimed the style is not used by other people. Quite the opposite. Not to mention, that education until 18 years of age is mandatory in Poland anyway.

> how is that not pretentious?

The straw man you made up definitely is.

> You started by saying complex sentences should always be preferred

I wrote that we were always taught to prefer one over another (there were multiple teachers along the way), not that we were taught to always prefer one over another.

> but now you ended by saying "only where applicable"

There is no "but now".

> and the sentence under discussion was "too long".

I believe it is indeed.

This is not about "writing to look smart". It's about using elegant style and using the language to it's full potential. There were multiple attempts to strip Polish people of their mother tongue and identity throughout the history, so we were taught to treasure both and use language's full richness. It's also simply nicer to listen to or read richer forms. These are the reasons for why we were told it speaks well of the speaker/writer. Also, elegance does not contradict communicating vital information. It's a false dilemma.