One of my biggest struggles with writing: hitting the right balance between precision and clarity.

My first drafts end up looking like this: I really enjoyed the book, with its blue cover, excellent illustrations, and four hundred twenty-one pages of suspenseful character-driven narrative. What a horrible sentence! So much detail, so much information, but it doesn't add anything.

All that detail seems like it would be useful, but it isn't; it's distracting. Be mindful that clarity is usually more important than extreme precision. The book's use of suspense enhanced the narrative.

I write a lot of text; much of it is computer code. Code, probably much like legalese, is the domain of extreme precision. Everyday English, not so much.

Another communication tip for engineers.