Einstein

I was going to claim that I came up with the idea that you should express as clearly as possible without sacrificing the complexity of the ideas. In other words, write clearly without dumbing anything down. Then I remember Einstein had been credited with something like that that. When I  looked it I found this:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

In its simpler form (make things as simple as possible but no more) it was attributed to Einstein by the composer Roger Sessions, and then taken from Sessions by the poet Louis Zukofksy.  My (Facebook) friend, Mark Scroggins, a prominent Z scholar, is quoted in the article tracking down the quote. There is something of Occam's razor here too: it is a principle of parsimony, as people point out in the comments.  

Attacks on "bad writing" in the humanities used to called "anti-intellectual." And it was argued that since the physicists have their jargon, why can't the humanists?  I'm fine with jargon if its goal is precision. For example, we talk about "extra-diegetic" music in film. That is the film score that the characters in the film cannot hear: it is only for the audience and hence outside of the diegesis of the film. As opposed to a movie in which someone goes into a bar in which a band is playing and it is too loud for them to hear each other.  That's a precise and useful distinction. It's too bad we need Greek to say it, instead of saying "inside the story-telling music" vs. "music for the audience only."

A good test is whether someone can explain a concept to you in their own words and give concrete examples. Then you think they understand it. Or if you ask two separate people to explain it and they come up with compatible explanations. Then you know it is a definition shared by people in the same community, not something that means whatever you want it to mean.