Interviewer: What's wrong with genteelisms? Like 'prior to' an | Ozodbek Botiraliyev

Interviewer: What's wrong with genteelisms? Like "prior to" and "subsequent to"?

David Faster Wallace: Well, I have trouble parsing your question. Genteelism seems to me to be an overly charitable way to characterize them. They are to me, they're like puff words. They're like using "utilize" instead of "use", which, in 99 cases out of a 100, is just stupid. Or "individual" for "person." More syllables is just puffed up. Why say "prior to" rather than "before"? Everybody knows what "before" means. It's fewer words. And I think, technically, given the Latin roots, it should be "posterior to", if you're going to use "prior to." So, if you're saying "prior to" and "subsequent to", you are in fact, in a very high-level way, messing up grammatically. But would you ever want to say, "posterior to"? No. So you don't say "prior to". But, you'll notice, this is the downside of starting to pay attention. You start noticing, you know, all the people who say, "At this time", rather than, "Now." Why did they just take up one-third of a second of my lifetime making me parse, "at this time", rather than just saying, "now", to me. And you start being bugged. But you get to be more careful and attentive in your own writing, so you become an agent of light and goodness, rather than the evil that's all around.

Source: @diyorbeksielts

P.S. Once again, the advice here isn't necessarily relevant to IELTS, but rather to Writing in general. Definitely show the examiner your best vocabulary.

@ozodbek_SK