Read moreRespect your reader. The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn’t worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.
—Jeff Goldfield
Read more. . . novelists . . . have, on average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdales’s department store. our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anyone can do it. All it takes is time.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 128
Read moreNo iron can stab the heart with such force
as a period put just at the right place.—Isaac Babel
Review: The Reader’s Mind by Yellowlees Douglas
As a writer, I’ve always adhered to Joan Didion’s practice when it came to punctuation, sentence structure, and the like: “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.” However, as a former English teacher, I believe grammar needs to be a logical practice that you can explain it...Read moreWrite simply.
But do not start to think
so damned simply.
Know how complicated it is
and then state it simply.—Ernest Hemingway
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