Quotes from Patricia T. O'Conner

A good writer is one you can read without breaking a sweat.

Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking.

If the good news from cyberspace is that we're writing more, the bad news is that most of us aren't very good at it. Our words don't do justice to our ideas.

With grammar, it's always something.

First, you need something to organize: ideas, material, scraps of expertise, recipes, prognostications, anecdotes, scurrilous gossip, anything that might be relevant to what you want to write. And you get this stuff by hoarding it, by faithfully making notes and squirreling them away.

An idea in your head is merely an idle notion. But an idea written down, that's the beginning of something! Stripped down to its briefs, a piece of writing is nothing more than a handful of ideas, put into words and arranged to do a job. We all get ideas—try not thinking in the shower. The trick is to write them down.

Contrary to popular opinion, there's no mystery to writing well. It's a skill that just about anyone can learn, more craft than art.

A generation or so after slavery ended, segregationists enacted Jim Crow laws that made it impossible for most blacks to vote in the South.