The discoveries you make in the making Style is an expression of the interest you take in the making of every sentence. It emerges, almost without intent, from your engagement with each sentence. It's the discoveries you make in the making of the prose itself. Where ambiguity rules, there is no "style"—or anything else worth having. Pursue clarity instead. In the pursuit of clarity, style reveals itself. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing The idea grows as they workFour principlesExpressing ideas helps to form them styleclaritymaking
Simple moments of clarity I have seen autistic children drawing at a terrific speed and I've always thought that my drawings should not be less rapid, because that speed gives them insignificance. In this speed lies their abandonment and it may cause them to be overlooked as mere doodles. However, I understand that they are like that pristine light that appears when they tell you that you have a tumour. In an instant, everything becomes clear and well-defined. All contours are cruelly illuminated as if it was worth taking a final look at the world. At such times, although the lines in the drawings clump into a skein of events that are indecipherable to ordinary mortals, they can be described in detail by the victim one by one. These are moments when weeds regain their nature as plants. Only now can I understand these drawings as simple moments of clarity. Smiljan Radić, Death at Home artclarity
Pellucidity A Definition www.thefreedictionary.com Free from obscurity and easy to understand; the comprehensibility of clear expression euphonyunderstandingthinkingclarity
Form follows failure Imagining how the form of things as seemingly simple as eating utensils might have evolved demonstrates the inadequacy of a "form follows function" argument to serve as a guiding principle for understanding how artifacts have come to look the way they do. Reflecting on how the form of the knife and fork has developed, let alone how vastly divergent are the ways in which Eastern and Western cultures have solved the identical design problem of conveying food to mouth, really demolishes any overly deterministic argument, for clearly there is no unique solution to the elementary problem of eating. What form does follow is the real and perceived failure of things as they are used to do what they are supposed to do. Clever people in the past, whom today we might call inventors, designers, or engineers, observed the failure of existing things to function as well as might be imagined. By focusing on the shortcomings of things, innovators altered those items to remove the imperfections, thus producing new, improved objects. Different innovators in different places, starting with rudimentary solutions to the same basic problem, focused on different faults at different times, and so we have inherited culture-specific artifacts that are daily reminders that even so primitive a function as eating imposes no single form on the implements used to effect it. Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things Against form follows functionForm follows function evolution