Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.
You can't be a good writer without being a good thinker.
To write is to think, and to write well is to think well.
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.
Whate'er is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with ease.
Mechanical rules are never a substitute for clarity of thought.
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.
He that will write well in any tongue must follow this counsel of Aristotle: to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do.
I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear.
One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.
People who think well, write well
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
Sometimes when people are under stress, they hate to think, and it's the time when they most need to think.
Whatever is clearly expressed is well wrote.
I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.
Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.
A clear thought, a pure affection, a resolute act of a virtuous will, have a dignity of quite another kind, and far higher than accumulations of brick and granite and plaster and stucco, however cunningly put together.
