Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose by Noel and Turner. I read it when I was trying to find a writing tone that I was comfortable with. Should

Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose by Noel and Turner. I read it when I was trying to find a writing tone that I was comfortable with. Should it be casual, cool, and excited! with lots of exclamations? or detached, clinical, and precise? or, flowery, fluffy, and inserting difficult words, especially "dichotomy" everywhere I could? One ideal I enjoyed was the 90s hacker writing aesthetic. PG's essays for example. It is easy to say "edit, edit, rewrite", but the tone was not easily pinned down. Clear and Simple as the Truth is the best writing book that I've read - it answered these questions for me thoroughly, and the writing is delightful. I've read it cover to cover twice, and find myself enjoying a few quotes on occasion. A quick takeaway among many - it is the sophistication and clarity of thought that matters, not one's facility with the language. "Great painters are often less skillful than mediocre painters; it is their concept of painting—not their skills—that defines their activity. Similarly, a foreigner may be less skillful than a native speaker at manipulating tenses or using subjunctives, but nonetheless be an incomparably better writer. Intellectual activities generate skills, but skills do not generate intellectual activities."