Quotes from Brooks Landon

The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed. Erskine

An assumption exists that long sentences are bad, but it is usually the case that bad sentences are long.

This is a book in which we will dance with language, not a book in which we will trudge toward remedial correctness.

Sentences that bring ideas and images into clearer focus by adding more useful details and explanation are generally more effective than those that are less clearly focused and that offer fewer details.

Unless the situation demands otherwise, sentences that convey more information are more effective than those that convey less. Sentences

Strunk and White do a great job of reminding us to avoid needless words, but they don't begin to consider all of the ways in which more words might actually be needed. My goal will be to explain why, in many cases, we need to add words to improve our writing, as Faulkner so frequently does, rather than trying to pare our writing down to some kind of telegraphic minimum, as is frequently the case with Hemingway.

A proposition, which is usually expressed in the form of a sentence, is a statement about reality that can be accepted or rejected.

I'm trying to make the point that the basic unit of writing is the proposition, not the word or even a sequence of words, and we build sentences by putting propositions together.