Respect 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 more

No iron can stab the heart with such force
as a period put just at the right place.

—Isaac Babel

Read more
Review: The Reader’s Mind 
by Yellowlees Douglas

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...

Write simply.
But do not start to think
so damned simply.
Know how complicated it is
and then state it simply.

—Ernest Hemingway

Read more
How to Deal with the Voices In Your Head

How to Deal with the Voices In Your Head

  At least Dr. Jekyll was never both himself and Mr. Hyde at the same time (for more modern readers, that should say, “At least Dr. Banner was never both himself and the Hulk at the same time,” if you catch my drift—who was it that said, “There are no new...