I supposed you're being downvoted for being so terse, but I generally agree with your comment, so it got my upvote. Yes, I am aware of how tacky it is to discuss voting, or making meta-comments in general.

I think that, in my opinion at least, these instructions apply VERY well to journalism, or perhaps certain types of fiction, but not fiction on the whole.

One of my recently favorite authors is Elmore Leonard, who breaks most of these rules with great ferocity, and is a fantastic writer on the whole.

He has his own rules on writing, but the first is:

"My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

In contrast to CS Lewis' writings, this leads to much more believable dialog, but that doesn't necessarily conform to any of Lewis' rules. Characters are seldom terse when they could instead be interesting. Characters are seldom cautious to take care that the reader can fully understand what they're saying. Characters are seldom as specific as you might like them to be.

I find this to be much more natural, and feels much less "like writing" than most other authors and for that, I appreciate him immensely.

my intention wasn't to be terse - more a meta commentary as every one of my points contradicts the respective point in OP

Since we're talking about good writing here, I feel it's only just that I point out that point three piqued your interest, not peaked it. Unless your interest was at its apex at point three, but since you liked points four and five so much, I doubt that's the case.

At any rate, his previous point about there being no "right" or "wrong" language is something that is absolutely true. I think that's the most important point in the letter, which is outside his list of five points.

Since this is already a post about language and writing:

> Point 3 peaked my interest

The homonym you want here is pique[1]

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pique definition 3