Quotes from Constance Hale

Ultimately, whether we are writing posts, paragraphs, essays, arguments, memoirs, monographs or even just the Great American Tweet, writing is and should be a grand adventure.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasion—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.

Remember, "being earnest" does not mean mimicking Hemingway.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind," wrote George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language." Orwell

Language offers us a surprising, savage terrain full of pockets and peaks. Shakespeare invented words like crazy. Mark Twain wrote in dialect. Muhammad Ali rapped in rhythmic sentences. Junot Diaz mixes Spanish into his sentences like rum into fruit juice. Nicki Minaj spices her lyrics with slang.

Ernest Hemingway once advised prose artists to 'Write hard and clear about what hurts.

Finally, don't be fooled by words like orientate or commentate, misguided back-formations from orientation and commentator; orient and comment do the job just fine. Don't use big words to gloss over the truth or to pump air into ideas.

The most common prepositional error is forgetting that the noun or pronoun in a prepositional phrase is the object of the preposition. The object of the preposition must be expressed in the objective case. Who can forget Jane Russell's line, in a 1970s Playtex ad, for a bra "for we full-figured gals." The preposition for mandates the pronoun us. But, then, Russell never was known for her pronouns.

Pronouns are proxies for nouns. They stand in willingly when nouns don't want to hang around sounding repetitive. The noun (or noun phrase), whose bidding the pronoun does, is called the antecedent—because it goes (ced-) before (ante-) the pronoun in the sentence or paragraph.

You'll most likely find interjections at the beginning of a sentence, followed by a comma or an exclamation point: Ahem! Wake up—this is the last chapter on parts of speech.

The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind, and they can be seen in the church basement Friday afternoon." This doozy, culled by Richard Lederer from a church bulletin, is an instance of "obscure pronomial reference," or, in plain English, a pronoun without a clear antecedent.

In French printer's jargon, cliche (which mimicked the sound of a mold striking molten metal) was a synonym for stereotype, which in turn evolved from the Greek for "solid impression." A stereotype was a printing plate that duplicated typography and that was used by the printer in lieu of the original. So a cliche is a word or phrase used over and over again in lieu of the original.

The English critic George Saintsbury once compared the act of sentence making--the letting out and pulling in of clauses--to the letting out and pulling in of the slide of a trombone or the "draws" of a telescope.

heed Hugh Blair, a very emeritus Edinburgh professor whose advice from 1783 has stood the test of more than two centuries: "Remember . . . every Audience is ready to tire; and the moment they begin to tire, all our Eloquence goes for nothing. A loose and verbose manner never fails to disgust . . . better [to say] too little, than too much.

To paraphrase Ezra Pound, don't imagine that the art of prose is any simpler than the art of music; spend as much time developing your craft as a pianist spends practicing scales. 'Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint, Pound argued in his 1913 essay, 'A Few Don'ts.

What would a grammar book be if it didn't lounge around in a little Latin? Let

If you write short, crisp sentences without any sinces or whens or althoughs, try stringing varied sentences together by using subordinate conjunctions. If you already rely on subordinate conjunctions, try rebalancing your sentences with ands and buts and fors and sos. Does the change of conjunctions change your style?

That's the alchemy of adjectives: boiling down an excess of ideas to the essence of a thing. We want the words to be precise and evocative. If we pick our adjectives carefully, any description can surprise.

Ernest Hemingway once advised prose artists to "Write hard and clear about what hurts." It's good advice. But to follow it, you must stop reading.

Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochure from brilliance, memo from memoir, a ship's log from The Old Man and the Sea .…The writer leaves us with a sense that we are listening to a skilled raconteur rather than passing our eyes over ink on paper.

We can twist poet Alexander Pope's diktat—"the sound must seem an echo of the sense"—into a caveat for the novice writer: When sound doesn't echo sense, the writing misfires.

To find the right pitch is to be human, to have a sense of the street, while still reaching for the lofty. It means resisting the kind of language that suits cogs in a machine better than sentient beings.