Notes on Clarity

Good writing usually looks simpler from the outside than it felt while being written. The clean version is often the result of sorting, compressing, and removing every sentence that is doing the job of thinking instead of the job of saying something.

One useful test is whether a paragraph can survive being read out loud. Sentences that only work on the page are often carrying more abstraction than they should.

Clear writing is not ornamental. It is evidence that the thought has been made portable.

What to cut

Most drafts have three common forms of waste: throat-clearing, repetition, and soft qualifiers. Removing them does not make writing harsher. It usually makes it more honest.

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