My father wrote for his living and made a good living doing so. One of the most pithy things I remember him saying about it is, "It's not the writing that gets you down; it's the thinking." It is clear evidence of murky, unfiunished thinking when the expression comes out as murky, inchoate writing.

Even at a more primitive vocab level, a clear thinker can express himself beautifully, and a muddy thinker with a grad-school vocabulary will (to the discerning ear) still sound muddy and inchoate.


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