lay down as much BS in as flowery language as I could muster,
So you use a dumbed down vocabulary that loses information in the resulting ambiguity. It is a balancing act. What you call flowery language, in the hands of a serious writer, is an attempt to pin point something. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. Know your audience. And if your audience is too broad, or you don’t know them, the average compression level in the US, is, sadly, at fifth grade level so that’s what you use.
re: “I find word choice to be a zero sum game with communicating. The more precisely you want to describe something, you increasingly use words outside of the common spoken vocabulary. The chance of baffling the reader, ie , failing to communicate, grows with precision.”
I have, and have never had a problem with technical writing.
It is “composition”, so-called “creative writing”, going on and on about some subject which I care not a whit about (SUCH as may be assigned in said classes) where I had trouble in finding an angle from which I felt compelled to write.
Had I approached it in purely BS, I-could-give-a-care mood, I would have had much more success in those early years. The BIG problem is overcoming a “writer’s block” to subject in which I had at the time ZERO interest.
Give me a technical subject, and it’s a whole ‘nother story ... the engineer/STEM mindset tends to ignore, discard, regard with little value just plain-out, “writing” for writing’s sake. We tend to have more on the mind than the ‘flavor of the day’.
I tend to disagree somewhat. Having worked for a leading edge engineering firm for thirty years 90% of my writing was technical documentation and instructions for users. It was parsed and parsed again. Content, structure, clarity and logic were stressed. And yet, this had to be produced so as to not sound as if it were written by a robot. Motherhood and apple pie were strictly prohibited. Personally, I found this a very rewarding field. As I advanced reviewing the technical documents, and later, signatory authority became the norm.
The decine of graduates writing ability started to become noticable in the late ‘70s to early ‘80s.