Bertrand Russell's advise to young writers.

 Bertrand Russell was not insensible to the charms of highly wrought or euphuistic English prose. He says he wrote his 'Freeman's Worship' (which I thought a bit Pateresque) at a time when he was so 'steeped in Milton's prose' that 'his rolling periods reverberated through the caverns of my mind'. Yet, this is his advise to budding scribes-

First: never use a long word if a short word will do.

Sadly, short words tend to be taken as sharp words and your interlocutors are all too ready to be equally short with you. 

Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences.

Or don't. Qualifications speak to your quality. Statements are swords naked of such scabbarding as permits discourse to flourish. 

Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

Think before you write. 

Take, say, such a sentence as the following, which might occur in a work on sociology: "Human beings

Sociology knows nothing of such creatures. Russell was being either naive or, in the manner of a nobleman, negligently charitable.  

are completely exempt from undesirable behavior patterns only when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favorable circumstances, whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous manner." 

Let us see if we can translate this sentence into English. I suggest the following: "All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had unusual luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing." This is shorter and more intelligible, and says just the same thing.

No. It is false in every specific. Few men are considered 'scoundrels' by their fellows just as few are considered 'clever' or 'good at math'. 

Sociology is statistical. 'Tyche' or 'luck' is not required in its vocabulary. Scoundrels deviate significantly from the mean. But so do people very brainy people like Russell or his descendants. 

But I am afraid any professor who used the second sentence instead of the first would get the sack.

Fair point. Elitists need to pretend they are egalitarian and that their hearts bleed for ignorant scoundrels like me.