Several of the statements aren’t true.

1. “I could care less” is correct because a) it’s an idiom, and b) it’s sarcastic. You can tell from the inflection (“less” is stressed). See Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct,” and this article by Mark Liberman: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001182.html

2. This was written by someone who doesn’t mind their p’s and q’s. See the following article, which cites the Chicago manual of style: http://www.dailywritingtips.com/when-to-form-a-plural-with-an-apostrophe/

3. “Literally” has been used as a mere intensifier literally since the 19th century. See this article for a mature discussion of it:http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2005/11/the_word_we_love_to_hate.html

7. And what do I think “nonplus” means?

8. “Effect” can be a verb, but its meaning is different from “affect.” Example: “Obama claimed he’d effect change, and that claim affected the election.” Look these words up in any dictionary.

Plus’s few advantages (integration with email contact lists, a good photo-sharing feature) are overwhelmed by one major flaw: it’s too self-centered. The heart of Google Plus is the stream, a place where you share your thoughts and comment on other people’s. Facebook has a stream too, but, crucially, Zuckerberg’s pals recognize that the stream takes second fiddle to the wall. The wall is what makes Facebook about socializing, rather than just talking. The wall is why I spend time on my friends’ pages rather than my own.

The wall gives me a fun, informal way to connect with someone and have conversations that are more casual than email and more convenient than phone calls. Plus, the wall lets me include other friends in the conversation.

Google Plus, on the other hand, narrows social interaction to two options: Email, a one-on-one interface that seems less than social; and stream comments, which put me the position of either a grandstanding author/speaker, or a second-class commentator. The problem is, we already had email, and if we wanted to grandstand, we’d blog. The stream format makes social interaction all about publishing my thoughts and getting comments, not about connecting with friends and groups on an equal basis.

For all its problems, Facebook at least offers a new place to truly socialize online. Google Plus still has one foot in pre-web 2.0 territory.

My writing followed a trajectory. It grew from childish simplicity to an over-inflated masquerade of maturity. I affected a colossal style to reflect my colossal aspirations and to project a colossal image. Perhaps it was because I had a colossal view of my self that I pretended to be more colossal than I knew I was. Adulthood was not my goal; greatness was, or at least its appearance.

Then I discovered clarity. Slowly, I pared down the adjectives, tightened up the stringy yarns of syntax, and aimed for a tight, dense, and absolutely clear prose. My aim was good, perhaps, for a beginner, but aim takes time to develop. I had puffed out my chest so long that it had stuck that way, and hardened. Deflation or even explosion was not an option; instead, I had to slowly press and grind my style back to a manageable size. As I did so, I reached, without knowing it, that elusive golden mean—that point of eloquence without loquaciousness or grandiloquence, and of clarity that was as yet unconfined.

But the process ran away from me, as processes tend to do. Perhaps skills and habits are like musical phrases—never static, always crescendo-ing or decrescendo-ing, always building tension or releasing it, but never relaxing in one spot. (If only dynamic phrasing were a musical ability more easily acquired, and steadiness of any skill more easily maintained!) At any rate, in my quest for concreteness I lost my imagination, and imagination is hard to capture.

But in the journey, I re-discovered in my own writing a fact I had known for some time by reading others’: That beauty does not stand still. One finds it, always, at an intersection—an intersection of tensions that, if they do not restrain each other, will destroy beauty altogether. In my case, as usually happens with trends in style (rhetorical or otherwise), that all-important intersection was a temporal affair. It was a moment that came and went, with one tension behind it, and the other ahead; a short span between a past habit of over-elaborateness and a future push toward prosaic penury. But within such temporal moments, beauty is in flux. If it is not pulled by one trend and another, it is still pulled by rules, on the one hand, and freedom, on the other. It is creativity within a framework of constraint.

I want to be a good writer. I want to find that point again. I don’t expect—nor hope—to stay there, for the summit is exhilarating only to a valley-dweller. Besides, why wish for the impossible? What cannot be is rarely good.