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Clarity

  • Lack of clarity is always a sign of dishonesty.

  • ... a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.

  • A passage is not plain English — still less is it good English — if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.

  • Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.

  • Whatever is clearly expressed is well wrote ...

  • ... if one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter.

  • I wanted a perfect ending ... Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. ... my life ... is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity ...

  • It took me forty years on earth / To reach this sure conclusion: / There is no Heaven but clarity, / No Hell except confusion.

    • Jan Struther,
    • "All Clear" (1940), A Pocketful of Pebbles ()
  • She always sees what you are aiming at, and with her keen eyes cuts straight through all your circumlocutions, and obliges you to descend direct on your point, with more rapidity than grace.

  • ... clarity need not be equivalent to / readability. How readable is the world?

    • Rae Armantrout,
    • in Christopher Beach, ed., Artifice and Indeterminacy ()