The National's Rick Arthur reminds us of George Orwell's six rules for good writing:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Avoid foreign phrases, scientific terms, or jargon words if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)

At some point, I suspect that Orwell's directives influenced the traditions of sacred law handed down in history departments by George B. Tindall at North Carolina and William B. Hesseltine at Wisconsin, which may have owed a debt to Maryland's Horace Samuel Merrill.