I think that many of the people who write clearly are successful. But I am not sure there is evidence of the arrow of causality pointing the other way. One thing to realize for clear communication is that there is: 1. The thing you wanna say 2. The thing you actually say 3. The words that reach the other 4. The thing they think you say there And if you do nothing about it, all four might be different constantly. Peop…
The added realisation to me is that, the order of priority among those 4 points is reversed for the recipient.
I lost count of the number of times I wrote a nuanced, structured answer on stackoverflow, only to get a tldr effect and have a wildly wrong oneliner chosen as the accepted answer.
It has really driven the point across for me that "better" isn't always better; if a good solution will put off people from even reading it, then sometimes giving people a trivial, supercrap solution to use as a starting point and build from there is the way to go.