: Re: How is simplicity better than precision and clarity in prose? Many recommend the Hemingway app, which pushes simplicity and the lowest possible reading level. Where I live, an illiterate person

@Barnes643

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Precision is not the opposite of simplicity or clarity.

As you mentioned, Hemmingway is known for his amazing precision, for spending a long time on single sentences. I read The Old Man and The Sea in high school, but I could easily have read it four years earlier. I would have missed the symbolism, but I would have understood the literal events. The most precise English speakers I know have never lived in an English-speaking country. Because speaking English requires so much focus for them already, they spend a lot of energy choosing the most accurate word or group of words out of the set available to them.

That said, you absolutely can use more educated words and still be clear. The key is to be precise. Lazy, imprecise writing is confusing and hard to follow. Having to look up a word in a dictionary may decrease clarity for the less literate reader somewhat, but the real bane of clarity is long, meandering sentences with incorrectly used words. If you describe the same drinking vessel as a glass, mug, and gobblet in the same scene, I will be very confused because each word conjures up a completely different image, not because gobblet is a word I learned later in life.

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