Clarity in writing is usually presented as a baseline — the minimum standard that all writing should meet before anything else is considered. Be clear first, the advice goes, and then be whatever else you want to be. Clarity is the foundation; style is what you build on top of it.

This framing is practical and mostly right, but it obscures something worth noticing. Clarity is not neutral. It is not simply the absence of obscurity, the way that silence is the absence of noise. Clarity in writing is a set of active choices — about sentence length, about word selection, about the relationship between ideas, about what to explain and what to leave for the reader to infer. And like all active choices, it has a character, a register, an effect on the reader that is as deliberate as any other element of style.