Popular Prose
Why Clarity is King
Your first priority is to communicate clearly
Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.” ~ E.B. White
You are probably familiar with the game of telephone, wherein a message is verbally passed from one person to the next. The fun of the game is seeing just how mangled the message becomes from all those handoffs. And the purpose, of course, is to illustrate how suspect our faculties are for listening and discernment.
At its best, writing avoids this sort of confusion because it is a direct communication between writer and reader, with no monkeys in the middle. It is a form of telepathy.
We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room… except we are together. We are close. We’re having a meeting of the minds. […] We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. ~ Stephen King, On Writing
This ideal is the highest form of writing, but it only occurs when the writing is clear. It is entirely possible for a writer’s message to be just as confusing as one created by the most spirited game of telephone. Such is the case with films such as The Rise of Skywalker, The Matrix: Revolutions, Inception, and Interstellar. Some creatives (such as Christopher Nolan), strive for complexity in…
