Here are two great writers, both from England, who addressed the state of modern English in a way that is still helpful and relevant.

George Orwell writes in 1946 in “Politics and the English Language”

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language…

I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Then later in the essay (read it) he gives some rules which are simple but so useful in writing of all kinds:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

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Here is another observation from a different English writer who noticed the same bad habits of writing a hundred years ago in 1909. G.K. Chesterton wanted to emphasize that this decline in writing is a product of a more general decline in clear reasoning and the resulting inactivity of mind.  He notices that not only does this modernized English keep the reader from understanding whats written — that is obvious enough — but that it is an effort to save the fatigued writers’ mind from the “toil of reasoning”:

Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought.  Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable.  Long words go writing by us like long railway trains.  We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable.

and later, even more succinctly:

In expressing confused ideas, the moderns have great subtlety and sympathy.  It is in expressing clear ideas that they generally find their limitations.