THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS
preferably someone who is not literary,—someone who more nearly represents the so-called "general public." Read your paragraphs to him and then ask him, "What does this mean to you? What have I tried to say?" If your amateur critic is dubious, if he arrives at a wrong idea, or catches the right one only after an obvious effort, then what you have written is badly done and must be written over. Now of course he cannot tell you just why it is badly done, or what particular words and phrases are misleading, or what would be the simplest twist by which to remedy them. He simply throws the burden back on you where it belongs; you will have to grope for the remedy; and a little groping, a little more hard work will not hurt you. What your friend has done is simply to serve a purpose analogous to that of retranslation in the case of documents such
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