I think this is a great presentation. I've found that learning to write has largely a process of unlearning everything I was taught in secondary school. In school we were conditioned to excrete as much bullshit as we could in a fixed amount of time. Everything we learned--new vocabulary, literary techniques--we were told was for sounding more sophisticated, which we unknowingly interpreted as verbose. I even remember a loved English teacher saying "the purpose of the first sentence in a short answer is make yourself sound smarter than you are. You shouldn't answer the question until at least the second sentence." And for some reason, every argument needed 3 supporting reasons, even though in real life there's almost always just one dominant reason.
Turns out actual good writing has precisely the opposite spirit. It's about compressing ideas into their simplest forms. New words are invented to make us more concise, not less. I wish I had realized this many years ago, before writing my essays for college admission.
Another thing done at all levels of schooling is to ignore the needed process of revision. A paper is written and then graded, but if revision was a focus the student would learn a great lesson: great ideas and writing take re-writing
Now that I think about it, an incredibly valuable exercise would be to give students a longwinded, vague, rambling essay and make them rewrite it to be as clear and concise as possible. This even works within the time-constrained test environment.
Turns out actual good writing has precisely the opposite spirit. It's about compressing ideas into their simplest forms. New words are invented to make us more concise, not less. I wish I had realized this many years ago, before writing my essays for college admission.