From Sol Stein's "On Writing": What I learned from my destroyed work were the two simple objectives of all prose writing, to be clear and to be precise.
Clarity and precision work because they remove the friction between what you mean and what the reader understands. A vague sentence asks the reader to do your work for you, guessing at intention, and most readers simply won't. Precision closes that gap before it opens. Take the line "She was upset about the weather." Clear enough, but imprecise. "She slammed the window shut when the rain started" shows the same emotion through a specific, checkable action, and the reader feels it rather than being told it. The caution: chasing precision too hard can strip prose of breathing room. Not every sentence needs a hard edge. Some of the best writing lives in a little ambiguity, a little music, a little room for the reader to meet you halfway. Precision should serve meaning, not replace all mystery with a filing cabinet.
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