Clarity is one of the most praised qualities in prose, and one of the least examined. We invoke it constantly, and yet what we mean by clarity in writing shifts depending on who is doing the invoking and what problem they are trying to solve. A writing teacher means one thing by it. An editor means another. A reader who puts down a book at page twelve because they cannot follow the argument means something else again. The word travels so freely, accumulates so many assumptions, that we rarely stop to ask whether we are all talking about the same thing. We are not, and the confusion is worth unpacking.