---
aliases: ["Writing for Clarity vs. Writing for Credit"]
Is A: Evergreen
Topics: ["[[topic-writing]]"]
Status: Published
---
# Writing for Clarity vs. Writing for Credit
There are two failure modes in technical writing. The first is jargon-as-camouflage: using complexity to signal expertise, so the reader can't tell if you actually know what you're talking about. The second is oversimplification-as-humility: stripping out necessary nuance to seem accessible.

Clarity is harder than either. It requires understanding a topic well enough to choose exactly which complexity to preserve and which to discard — and being honest about which parts you don't fully understand yourself.

The best technical writers I've read are ruthlessly honest about the limits of their knowledge. This is what earns trust.

The distinction between writing for clarity and writing for credit maps directly to audience relationship. Writing for credit is author-centered: the goal is for the reader to think "this person is smart." Writing for clarity is reader-centered: the goal is for the reader to think "now I understand this." These goals occasionally align, but they diverge more often than most writers realize. A paragraph that makes the author look knowledgeable — dense with jargon, referencing obscure research, structured as an academic argument — often fails to actually transfer understanding to the reader. The writer walks away feeling validated; the reader walks away confused but blaming themselves for not being smart enough.

I catch myself writing for credit more often than I would like to admit, and the tell is always the same: I am reaching for complexity rather than arriving at it. When I genuinely understand something, the explanation flows toward simplicity because I can see which details matter and which are decorative. When I am on shaky ground, I unconsciously pile on complexity to obscure the gaps in my understanding. The cure is embarrassingly simple: I ask myself, "Could I explain this to a smart friend who has no context on this topic?" If the answer is no, I do not understand it well enough to write about it, and I need to go learn more before I write.

This principle has shaped Refactoring's editorial voice. I aim for what I think of as "earned simplicity" — explanations that are simple not because they skip complexity but because they have digested complexity and extracted the essential insight. This is dramatically harder than either academic-style complexity or shallow hot-takes, but it is the voice that readers trust and return to. When a reader emails to say "you made me understand something I have been confused about for years," that is the signal that the writing is serving clarity rather than credit. Those emails are worth more to me than any engagement metric.

The AI writing revolution makes this distinction even more consequential. AI can produce writing that sounds knowledgeable — it generates the surface patterns of expertise effortlessly. But it struggles with earned simplicity because that requires genuine understanding of which details to keep and which to discard, which is a judgment that depends on having actually grappled with the material. As AI-generated content floods every niche, the ability to write with genuine clarity — to actually transfer understanding rather than to perform understanding — becomes the primary differentiator for human writers.

## Key insight
The fundamental question to ask about any piece of technical writing is: "Who is this serving — the author's reputation or the reader's understanding?" Writing for clarity requires the humility to be simple where simplicity serves the reader, even when complexity would make the author look smarter. It also requires the honesty to say "I don't fully understand this part" rather than obscuring gaps with jargon. In an era of AI-generated content that effortlessly mimics expertise, genuine clarity — earned through deep understanding and presented with intellectual honesty — is the most valuable and rarest form of technical writing.

## Related
- [[ai-wont-replace-thinking]] — AI can mimic the surface of expertise but cannot produce earned clarity
- [[on-consistency-in-creative-work]] — Regular writing practice develops the clarity muscle through repetition
- [[newsletter-subject-lines]] — Clarity over cleverness in subject lines mirrors the broader writing principle
- [[the-real-job-of-a-newsletter]] — Clarity serves the reader's job-to-be-done; credit-seeking undermines it
- [[note-on-writing-well]] — Zinsser's principles of clear, honest writing as a foundational reference
