You are, in the winged words of Lrr, confused and infuriated. For one thing, this is a talk - not a detailed essay or a class. It's meant to be brief and engaging rather than a technical deconstruction of others writing. He isn't going to offer detailed alternatives or examples because he wants his audience to stay awake.<p><i>He has contempt for her writing because he has contempt for her job.</i><p>He never said such a thing. He does, rightfully, have contempt for her writing because it is bad. It is bad as writing and it is also bad as a 'sentimental, idealistic sales pitch'. Are you saying a sales pitch must be written badly?<p><i>Should we really declare one approach to a subject "better" because it results in punchier prose? </i><p>Not punchier, but better, more evocative, more accessible to a wide audience. The sort of prose a journalist should write and Zissner is, after all, speaking to future journalists. You insist on interpreting 'better' in a strangely literal, obtuse way - it's a fairly common little flourish (yes, English has them too) - and makes sense in the context. We say things like that -'the artist conveys the sense of grief/longing/joy/whatever better than any neurobiologist/psychologist/etc' all the time. It obviously doesn't mean poetry can replace the sciences.<p><i>Now he's just being lazy. He laments that people talk using "the working vocabulary of their field." Why shouldn't they? It's his job as a writer to produce the working vocabulary of his field</i><p>He's being lazy? How is he being lazy? He's telling his students that they will encounter this kind of speech and it is, indeed, their job to translate it to something better.<p>His whole talk is very much patterned after the stylistic advice given by Orwell in <i>Politics and the English Language</i>. Read it if you haven't. You might find Orwell a bit of a prick too. Or at least prickly. He's also right.