Language Quotes - Page 19

• To simplify complications is the first essential of success.

  George Earle Buckle

  Success, Writing, Plain And Simple

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• His Majesty the King requires that the Royal Chancellery in all written documents endeavor to write in clear, plain Swedish.

  Charles XII of Sweden

  Kings, Writing, Majesty

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• Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Writing, Plain Language, Imagination

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• Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

  Henry Watson Fowler

  Writing, Simple, Wish

  Henry Watson Fowler, Francis George Fowler (1931). “The King's English”, Oxford University Press

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• The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Writing, Cutting, Important

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• Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Writing, Superfluous

  "The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow".

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• The secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Writing, Cutting, Play

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

  William Safire

  Writing, Long, Use

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• No compulsion in the world is stronger than the urge to edit someone else's document.

  H. G. Wells

  Writing, Stronger, World

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• He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.

  John Ray

  Writing, Use, Using Words

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• Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

  Edward Albee

  Book, Writing, Reality

  Edward Albee (2009). “Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee”, p.48, Da Capo Press

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• In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell.

  Donald E. Westlake

  Attitude, Writing, Vocabulary

  Donald E. Westlake (2014). “The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany”, p.28, University of Chicago Press

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• The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that's not just true of languages. It's true of every subject.

  Noam Chomsky

  Education, Teaching, Reading

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• Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules."

  Stephen King

  Writing, Police, Add

  Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.113, Simon and Schuster

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• The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.

  Lawrence Clark Powell

  Writing, Feelings, Three

  Lawrence Clark Powell (1985). “Books are basic: the essential Lawrence Clark Powell”, Univ of Arizona Pr

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• The language of the street is always strong.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Strong, Writing, Streets

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871”, p.22, University of Georgia Press

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• One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.

  Denise Levertov

  Writing, World, Obligation

  Denise Levertov (1973). “The poet in the world”, New Directions Publishing Corporation

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• Every language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved.

  Casey Miller

  Writing, Prejudice

  Casey Miller, Kate Swift (2001). “The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing”, p.4, iUniverse

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• Grammar is the analysis of language.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Writing, Analysis, Grammar

  Edgar Allan Poe (2014). “Complete Collection of Edgar Allan Poe - 170+ eBooks (Complete Tales, Poems, Novels, Essays, Miscellaneous, Play)”, p.1305, Ageless Reads

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• This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

  Lawrence Clark Powell

  Writing, Doe

  Lawrence Clark Powell (1985). “Books are basic: the essential Lawrence Clark Powell”, Univ of Arizona Pr

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• The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Running, Writing, Hype

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• Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Writing, Clarity, Depends

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• Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Writing, Defining, Framework

  'Thinking in Primitive Communities' in Hoyer (ed.) 'New Directions in the Study of Language' 1964

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• There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.

  Washington Irving

  Writing, Principles, Human Nature

  Washington Irving (2015). “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. – The Complete Collection: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, The Voyage, Roscoe, A Royal Poet, A Sunday in London and many more (Illustrated)”, p.133, e-artnow

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• Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner.

  John Dewey

  Writing, Partners, Indispensable

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Abraham Kaplan (2008). “The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953, Volume 10: 1934, Art as Experience”, p.111, SIU Press

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