The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Easy writing makes hard reading.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to think. Every paragraph should be so clear and unambiguous, that the dullest fellow in the world may not be able to mistake it, nor obliged to read it twice in order to understand it. Lord Chesterfield What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. Rules may obviate faults, but can never confer beauties. The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.