Azzam To'meh

“BAG: What do you suppose would happen to an American airline, not necessarily American Airlines, but all the airlines use officialese . . . What do you suppose would happen to that airline if you and I were hired to rewrite all their spiels in good, plain, humane English? Would that be a business drag on that company, or would it be good for them?

DFW: I think the really interesting question is why hasn’t this been done before? It would be a fascinating experiment. Here’s my guess. It would be a great marketing device. It would be a way to look different from other airlines. It would sound more human. Right? I mean, we always get these corporations: “We care about you. Therefore, we proactively try to facilitate your growing business needs.” Well, that second clause communicates the opposite of “We care about you” because that second clause isn’t a human-to-human contact.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“One of the things that the college drummed into me is, “Welcome to the adult world. It doesn’t care about you. You want it to? Make it. Make it care.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“Exercises as boneheaded as you take a book you really like, you read a page of it three, four times, put it down, and then try to imitate it word for word so that you can feel your own muscles trying to achieve some of the effects that the page of text you like did. If you’re like me, it will be in your failure to be able to duplicate it that you’ll actually learn what’s going on.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“But you overuse the passive voice, you‘re distorting the normal order of the sentences. You’re filling it up, often with prepositions or with forms of the verb to be, which is one of the ways that writing gets flabbed out. And you’re dehumanizing the writing because there’s no agent. Right?. So it immediately becomes more abstract, so the reader’s eyes glaze over quickly.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way