Annie Dillard Quotes

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.

Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

People are funny in like young adulthood, just like how people's musical tastes are cool, but it changes very rapidly. In five or ten years, I'll probably still be confident about what's funny but it probably won't be funny anymore.

Punctuation, is? fun!

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

I've concluded that getting the categories right is an absolutely crucial step to building useful management theory, and unfortunately too few writers do this. You've got to engage in serious scholarship, and then figure out how to write it in a way that lots of people can understand.

Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.

If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing.

One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought.

No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

I have always wanted to write in such a way that will make people think, Why, I've always thought that but never found the words for it.

In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

The script is like music to me. I approach it like it's a musical piece and I hear how it's supposed to sound when people say the words. There's rhythms and there's intonations and things, and so, when somebody comes in and hits the notes that I hear, I go okay. Or, they come close enough, and then I'll say "Well how about you try it like this?" and if they have a good ear and they can pick it up, then I think okay, they've got it.

The only people who should use the possessive 'we' are kings, newspaper editors, and persons with tapeworms.

The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.

You could figure out at least 80 percent of the context and meaning of a text if people used punctuation, and we wouldn't have had to write our sketch.

The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

The bar for being shocking doesn't even exist anymore. What am I going to do to shock people? Seriously, try to get The Fisting Musical off the ground? Its really at this point, there is no bar.

People who try to create a musical revolution do not have a chance, but those who turn their back to music can sometimes find it.

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.