In circumstances most contemporaneous with our current state of affairs, a frightening preponderance of the student body has resorted to the substitution of inordinately protracted vocabulary for language we’d deem more commonplace. Indeed, banality is no sin in composition; fear not the ordinary as it pertains to elocution. Disparage not the simpler men whose articulation of sentiment is packaged as accessible to the masses — rather, subject to mental inquisition those who succumb to the archaic pretensions of ivory towers.

Just kidding.

For those of you who actually understood that first paragraph, congratulations for being on Membean Level 5. And for those of you who didn’t, and perhaps pulled out a dictionary or gave up altogether, don’t worry: You’re in the majority.

That so-called majority is where everyone started out, after all. We were all once “Orwellian” writers who kept our words short, simple and to-the-point. We followed all of the rules laid out in “Politics and the English Language” by nature. Our language was clear and modest, our sentences simple enough that a reader wouldn’t need to perform mental gymnastics to follow our logic.

But for some of us, entering high school — in other words, the Big Leagues — meant stepping up our game. And so we made a thesaurus our new best friend, as it is so clearly — ahem, “indubitably” — a worthwhile investment to change words out, one at a time, into their more complicated counterparts, perhaps even without understanding the true meanings behind some of the more nuanced synonyms.

Before you know it, you’re looking up “friendly” in the thesaurus so you can better describe Sodapop from “The Outsiders.” You find the perfect word — ”benign” (like a tumor) — and type away: “Sodapop, who exhibited nothing but benign characteristics toward his familial, Ponyboy, and comrade, Johnny…”

Slowly but surely, we convert our faux-Orwellian writing styles into faux-“Melvillian” ones. We attempt to compose beautiful strings of deliberately-chosen lexemes, freely interchanging between languages to find that “je ne sais quoi” that English teachers so adore.

As part of that process, average essay length gets longer, as students stuff papers with unnecessary quotes and details. Average sentence length gets longer, as students tack on more and more and more independent clauses to show how flexible their writing can be. Average word length gets longer, because longer words are supposedly more intelligent words.

The promised result is better writing. But that’s not what we get in reality.

Instead, we get muddy, ungraceful, cancerous beasts that somehow still classify as prose — their tumors filled with Membean fan-favorites like “verisimilitude” that really have no place in the English language.

At our best (and sometimes, this means at our lowest Membean level), we write the way we write because we have found the best way of communicating ideas to other humans. Deep down, though, high school students seek that reward-center glee of satisfying their parents, teachers or even themselves with what promises to be a wonderful essay grade. And our writing is slowly molded to maximize that grade, so that our teachers’ expectations — or at least, our perceptions of our teachers’ expectations — have a huge influence on the clarity and concision of our writing (or lack thereof).

This is not to say that it’s easy to teach proper, good writing to a population fluent in Emoji first, and English second. Nobody envies the indescribably difficult task of improving sentence structure or word choice that’s been bestowed upon educators.

But by needlessly complexifying our writing, the raw, powerful emotions behind clear language disappears — the same emotions that teachers emphasize with great conviction in classic literature. These emotions are replaced by a tidal wave of words that are not our own: every sly, subtle smile, every eye twinkling with hope or excitement, every outburst of madness and rage. Our writer’s voices are systematically destroyed — and then we wonder why it is so difficult to write a simple college essay.

Good writing should be defined by its content, creativity and voice. Good writing should not be defined by jamming in as many Membean words as you can, littering them throughout your essay as you would mines in a battlefield. Except the explosions are convoluted meanings and the collateral damage is the effectiveness of the overall writing.

So I’ll end by translating what I said originally into “language we’d deem more commonplace.” Nowadays, too many of us have replaced simple and ordinary language with overly complex, convoluted sentences. Some of us do this because we’ve assumed that we’ll sound smarter or more credible by dishing out words straight out of archaic, seventeenth-century academia.

And to be fair, that assumption is somewhat justified; after all, nobody wants to go under the knife when they hear their surgeon refer to the stylomastoid foramen as “that one white thing coming out of your face there.”

Then again, doctors typically translate their jargon for their patients into the simple, the commonplace. Their goal is not to intimidate or highlight their intellect — it’s to communicate a message, and that’s what ours should be, too. Even if that message brims only with, alas, words from Membean Level 1.