Read moreGetting it wrong is part of
getting it right.—Charles Handy
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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