Check out Huffington Post‘s “The new illiteracy — obfuscation — hinders progress.” The author mentions some top notch plain language efforts like the Center for Plain Language and PLAIN. But he assumes obfuscation is a recent problem. I wrote a very brief history of the problem in Why hasn’t plain language become the norm?
Related articles
- Obfuscation (Say What?) (kigerjosh.wordpress.com)
- Words Matter: The Financial, Spiritual and Cognitive Cost of Language Obfuscation (bigthink.com)