Bad Writing And Ukraine Analysis
I spent the first part of my working career making red (or blue) marks like those above, and I thereby learned what Samuel Johnson meant when he said teaching is "intricate misery". If I discovered anything else in the process, it was that bad writing has a close relation to bad thinking, but I'm not sure if I can go much beyond that. This seems to apply to what passes for prestigious analysis of the current war in Ukraine, especially from the Institute for the Study of War. Let's take a passage from their April 26 update : Russian forces have adopted a sounder pattern of operational movement in eastern Ukraine, at least along the line from Izyum to Rubizhne. Russian troops are pushing down multiple roughly parallel roads within supporting distance of one another, allowing them to bring more combat power to bear than their previous practice had supported. This could actually be a good introductory sentence for several subsequent paragraphs giving specific insta...