Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/197

 though anyone possessed of normal understanding ought to grasp the fact that it simply denotes the ability to express in words any particular thought that you may have shaped in your mind and to express it in such succinct and unmistakable terms that any reader of ordinary intelligence will receive in his own brain a faithful image of that thought and be able at request to mirror it faithfully back to you in his own words. Yet, as a matter of fact, clearness is a quality that is either very much misunderstood or else quite wantonly disregarded. There are a large number of writers, and able writers too, who seem to think that they are quite clear enough if they get their thoughts down in a form capable of being understood by the reader who goes to work to extract the meaning with something of that energy with which one applies the nut-cracker to a refractory nut. This whole question of clearness