Unclear Writing Quotes

Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell.

Everytime a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity, he is writing something so that endless others of his craft can make a living out of trying to figure out what he said. Course perhaps he really haden't said anything, that's what makes it so hard to explain.

The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer.

When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.

Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

But do not give it to a lawyer's clerk to write, for they use a legal hand that Satan himself will not understand.

There wasn't much technical terminology, and then, most academics are not trained in writing. And there is what is probably worse than ever before, the growing use of professional jargon.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

Actually 'bad' doesn't do justice to my handwriting. Neither does 'handwriting.' 'Desecration of paper' about covers it.

The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head nor tail out of it.

Many a writer seems to think he is never profound except when he can't understand his own meaning.

Good stories flow like honey. Bad stories stick in the craw. A bad story? One that cannot be absorbed on the first time of reading.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

University printing presses exist, and are subsidised by the Government for the purpose of producing books which no one can read; and they are true to their high calling.

One of my biggest pet peeves is that I just don't like it when characters do things that are funny to the writer, but you don't know why they're doing it and it doesn't make any sense.

The flaw of an amateur is to assume what's in our head is what's on the page.

I find it hard to put complicated situations clearly on paper and, to be brutally frank, even harder to get a reply from you in time to count much.