Quotes from Kenneth Roman

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead,

Someone asked Rodin how he could sculpt an elephant out of marble. It's easy, he responded, "You just chip away everything that isn't an elephant." Chip away everything that isn't your point.

There are only 266 words in the Gettysburg Address. The shortest sentence in the New Testament may be the most moving: "Jesus wept.

One executive suggests a discipline — putting down first what you want the reader to do, next the three most important things the reader needs to understand to take that action, then starting to write. When you're done, he suggests asking yourself whether if you were the reader, would you take action on the basis of what is written.

Bad writing slows things down; good writing speeds them up.

Take the time to boil down what you want to say, and express it confidently in simple, declarative sentences. Remember the man who apologized for writing such a long letter, explaining that he didn't have time to write a short one.

Most murky writing is inadvertent, a sincere if doomed effort to communicate. Far worse is the deliberate attempt to say something that you know readers won't like in a way that you hope they won't understand.

This style of talk is generally heard among middle managers. It seldom comes from the CEO, who, having risen to the top, is less interested in impressing people than in clear communications — and getting things done.

Bill Phillips, one of his successors as chairman, captured the spirit in his mantra: "Work hard. Play hard. Sleep fast.

No sale, no commission. No commission, no eat. That left a mark on me.

If you can't advertise yourself, what hope do you have of being able to advertise anything else?

What comes after "Dear" is worth some thought. Use first names only when you're already on a first-name basis. Don't become anybody's pen pal by unilateral action. Use titles — Dr., Judge, Professor, Senator — when they apply.

Yours truly" benefits from a lack of any specific silly meaning. It is as rooted in convention as "Dear George," and useful for that reason.

Regards," "Best wishes," "All the best" are more personal than the others and less formal, but not appropriate if you don't know your reader. And there isn't anything wrong with simply

Down with advertising that forgets to promise the consumer any benefit. Down with creative show-offs. Too clever by half. If you spend your advertising budget entertaining the consumer, you are a bloody fool. Housewives don't buy a new detergent because the manufacturer told a joke on television last night. They buy it because it promised a benefit. If I could persuade the lunatics to give up their pursuit of awards, I would die happy.

Woman without her man has no reason for living. With a colon and a comma, the writer would get a different reaction: Woman: without her, man has no reason for living.

A common mistake in business writing is to use quotation marks for emphasis: This bolt provides "superior" tensile strength. When the head of a large company put quotation marks around a word in an important paper, his administrative assistant asked him why he did that. He replied that it was to stress the truth of the point. The assistant asked whether it would stress the truth if he were to register at a hotel as John Durgin and "wife.