If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it. It’s a common saying and it’s very true.

“It forces them to think about the elements that go into good writing,” he said, “and it shows them that there are many different kinds of good writing, not just one. I was amazed at what happened when students questioned each other about the writing in a historical account. Their ideas became much more focused when the whole class discussed a pass

“Only children know what they are looking for,”

“Teach ’em.” — Steve Brouse, my friend and colleague, who said this to a teacher who was complaining that her students didn’t already know something

The great American novelist Elmore Leonard summed this up nicely when he said, ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’

Children Hear What You Do, Not What You Say

E. B. White makes the case cogently in The Elements of Style, a book every writer should read once a year, when he suggests trying to rearrange any phrase that has survived for a century

your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.16