Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/217

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS value of football in a pedagogical magazine, you will use a different and simpler terminology. And in each case what you write may be quite clear to the audience for whom you intend it. The only thing to guard against is the chance of making a mistake in your audience, the danger of attributing to them a special knowledge which they do not possess. For that reason, it is a good plan to underrate rather than overrate the average intelligence of your readers. Any physician can understand what has happened if you say that a man has broken the bones of his forearm, but readers who are not physicians may have to stop and think if you write that he has suffered a fracture of both radius and ulna.

And in the fourth place, your vocabulary may be of the simplest and yet your work may convey to a large majority of readers a sense of inpenetrable density. There [203]