Clarity of Communication Quotes

Is that clear?" said Borcht "as clear as pea soup" I said

Sometimes it is necessary to make things clearer than the truth.

Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.

Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity.

When it's foggy in the pulpit it's cloudy in the pew.

The most important things must be said simply, for they are spoiled by bombast; whereas trivial things must be described grandly, for they are supported only by aptness of expression, tone and manner.

One of the most pernicious effects of haste is obscurity.

If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.

When you say: The simple truth is this, and then you pause, and then you finish the sentence, people stop, and they think specifically about what you're saying. And it's, in essence, trying to boil it down to something that's very understandable and meaningful.

Simplicity of expression rather than complexity of form.

It takes courage and skill to be unambiguous and clear.

Yeah, well, that's what you said the last time it did this, and it was doing it that time too,' Tiercel said waspishly. Clear as mud,' Harrier muttered.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code... obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

Did all this make sense?

It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.

Are you trying to tell all of us we have a bad signal-to-noise ratio?

You have to really know what you're saying.

It is sheer laziness not compressing thought into a reasonable space.

Why should things be easy to understand?

It is by great economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

You try to make every word count, so there's no doubt what you're talking about. When you're young, you waffle away. Well, I'm done with that. I think it's much more interesting to say just what you mean.

I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.