Daily Inspiration Quote by F. L. Lucas

Clarity, Lucas implies, is not a gift you’re born with; it’s a form of manners you choose to practice. The line is pointedly anti-romantic about writing: no muse, no lightning bolt, just “taking trouble,” the unglamorous labor of revising, cutting, reordering, and checking what your sentences actually do on the page. He treats lucidity less as style than as ethics.

The pivot is the second clause: write “to serve people rather than to impress them.” Lucas is quietly accusing a certain kind of writer - and a whole academic culture - of confusing difficulty with intelligence. The subtext is social: obscurity can be a status signal, a way to keep your audience at arm’s length while still looking authoritative. If readers don’t understand, the writer can pose as deep; the failure becomes proof of sophistication. Lucas calls that bluff. Serving people means you accept responsibility for being understood, which requires empathy: you imagine the reader’s confusion before it happens, you define terms, you choose concrete verbs over fog, you build a path instead of a maze.

As a mid-century critic, Lucas is also defending criticism itself against the charge of being parasitic or self-regarding. He wants prose that earns its place by being useful: a bridge between ideas and publics, not a velvet rope around a private club. The sting is that “clarity” isn’t neutral - it’s a rebuke to anyone who writes chiefly to be admired.