While one is writing for Indian sites exclusively and that too on general subjects, language consisting words from Victorian English would attract lesser viewers or they will change the page as soon as they would read a few lines. Our site caters mainly for Indians, 98% of its viewers are from India and 2% come from other countries mostly from the US, those again like to read simple English.
The fact of the matter remains that the very concept of simplicity is person specific and even Americans whom you claim to be lovers of simple English language express themselves in literature and films in not so simple language!!!
I agree with you ! What matters is the confidence with which you are able to express yourself and are able to put forth your thoughts in print ! I also feel that we need to constantly improvise and experiment otherwise we will be stuck in a grove using the same words ,phrases and sentences ...
I have a feeling as has been rightly pointed by Gulshanji that the writing style too has an evolutionary course. A style evolves over a period of time. Call it simple, complex or whatsoever, no writer ever remains conscious of simplicity or complexity as long as his or her lucidity of thoughts on different subjects choose their own grammar and vocabulary. Be these Han Anderson's fairy tales or Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion or Shakespeare works - never will you find any obtrusive desire to be simple or complex!! All they were natural. I firmly believe it is very difficult to deceive readers. If I am concealing my poverty content-wise with plain verbosity and pomposity - I am in for it!!!!
I agree with you, they were natural and they were natural because English was their mother tongue, i would like to see them as natural if they ever wrote a para in my my mother tongue! :whistle:
I don't know if Shaw would have failed to produce the same naturalness had he decided to write it in any other language but there are examples galore of immortal successes achieved by non-native English writers. What about Joseph Conrad the Polish author who picked up English much later yet produced some immortal classics in English?? What about our very own, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan, Nirodh Chowdhuri, Khushwant Singh and a host of others who competed with the very best and a few of them even won international laurels like Pulitzer, Bookers etc. If Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Amitava Ghosh could so brilliantly succeed I don't see any reason for native English writers being as natural in any other language. In this context I remember J.L. Nehru's advice to be bi or multi-lingual to acquire greater mastery of one's language.