Quotes About Writing

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And

Savoring good prose is not just a more effective way to develop a writerly ear than obeying a set of commandments; it's a more inviting one.

Good writing takes advantage of a reader's expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence (general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc.

They matters of correct usage pale in importance behind coherence, classic style, and overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of standards of intellectual conscientiousness. If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents by the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.

creative wordsmiths, who need to know the canons of pedestrian prose

Literate people should know how to think about grammar.

Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself.

The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you're pretending to communicate.

The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The

I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of many other virtues in writing.

Adam Freedman points out in his book on legalese, "What distinguishes legal boilerplate is its combination of archaic terminology and frenzied verbosity, as though it were written by a medieval scribe on crack.

Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.

what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind?

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of…"), but with a contenful observation that provokes curiosity

For example, there is an old grammarian's saw about how a sentence can end in five prepositions. Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior's bedroom to read him a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, "Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?

In this chapter I have tried to call your attention to many of the writerly habits that result in soggy prose: metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of don'ts.

According to studies of writing quality, a varied vocabulary and the use of unusual words are two of the features that distinguish sprightly prose from mush.

Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes available.

Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!

They left. Among the many dumb rules of paragraphing foisted on students in composition courses is the one that says that a paragraph may not consist of a single sentence. Wilkerson ends a richly descriptive introductory chapter with a paragraph composed of exactly two syllables. The abrupt ending and the expanse of blankness at the bottom of the page mirror the finality of the decision to move and the uncertainty of the life that lay ahead. Good writing finishes strong.

the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond. Speech

If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents but the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.

Though bad writing has always been with us, the rules of correct usage are the smallest part of the problem. Any competent copy editor can turn a passage that is turgid, opaque, and filled with grammatical errors into a passage that is turgid, opaque, and free of grammatical errors. Rules of usage are well worth mastering, but they pale in importance behind principles of clarity, style, coherence, and consideration for the reader.