Hi. Tempshill 18:05, 18 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell, is the best 5,321-word guide to writing that you'll find.
There is no need for our writing on Wikipedia to be dry while being encyclopedic. Probably my favorite clause I have written on Wikipedia is "...Hewlett-Packard's now-forgotten NewWave...." Has NewWave technically been completely forgotten by our civilization? No, but it is not an error to call it "now-forgotten", and that term makes the sentence a lot more interesting and informative to the layman. And it's still extremely accurate — not 100% accurate, but somehow more accurate than it would be if "now-forgotten" were deleted.
In this vein, my favorite sentence in all of Wikipedia is currently a comment in the Borat article: "Everything that Borat has said about Kazakhstan is incorrect."