vocabulary selection Quotes

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

And that's why people no longer care which words they use as long as they use lots of them.

Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.

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

Use familiar words-words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.

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.

If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person, I would use the Latinate vocabulary more, but I do think Anglo-saxon is the language of emotion.

A real writer can be recognized by the fact he doesn't find words. Therefore he must search for them and while doing that, he finds better ones.

I'm just very careful with my words when I write. Obsessively careful. I'm the sort of person who worries about the difference between "slim" and "slender."