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
Heuristics That Almost Always Work An Article by Scott Alexander astralcodexten.substack.com Sometimes there’s a Heuristic That Almost Always Works, like “this technology won’t change everything” or “there won’t be a hurricane tomorrow”. And sometimes the rare exceptions are so important to spot that we charge experts with the task. But the heuristics are so hard to beat that the experts themselves might be tempted to secretly rely on them, while publicly pretending to use more subtle forms of expertise. …Maybe this is because the experts are stupid and lazy. Or maybe it’s social pressure: failure because you didn’t follow a well-known heuristic that even a rock can get right is more humiliating than failure because you didn’t predict a subtle phenomenon that nobody else predicted either. Or maybe it’s because false positives are more common (albeit less important) than false negatives, and so over any “reasonable” timescale the people who never give false positives look more accurate and get selected for. expertiseheuristicsprediction