In his book Style (Cassell, 1955), Lucas offered the following basic principles to „shorten that painful process” of learning how to write better.

Brevity

It is bad manners to waste [the reader’s] time. Therefore brevity first, then, clarity.

Clarity

It is bad manners to give [readers] needless trouble. Therefore clarity. . . . And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

Communication

The social purpose of language is communication–to inform, misinform, or otherwise influence our fellows. . . . Communication [is] more difficult than we may think. We are all serving life sentences of solitary confinement within our bodies; like prisoners, we have, as it were, to tap in awkward code to our fellow men in their neighboring cells.

Emphasis

Just as the art of war largely consists of deploying the strongest forces at the most important points, so the art of writing depends a good deal on putting the strongest words in the most important places.. One of the most important things, to my mind, in English style is word-order word.

Honesty

As the police put it, anything you say may be used as evidence against you. If handwriting reveals character, writing reveals it still more. You cannot fool all your judges all the time. Most style is not honest enough. Easy to say, but hard to practice. A writer may take to long words, as young men to beards–to impress. But long words, like long beards, are often the badge of charlatans. Or a writer may cultivate the obscure, to seem profound. But even carefully muddied puddles are soon fathomed.