Lunch yesterday with pal Pat McGuire, the most literate county treasurer in the history of the nation.
Pat tossed out a phrase, I forget the book he cited, "The Canadian spoke like a thrifty man sending a telegram."
That's a good one.
I was also thinking the other day about my dad's favorite line, "You can say what you want with a slide trombone, but with words you gotta be careful."
Keep it going, readers.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
~George Orwell
Ooh, starting with Orwell. Bold play, Ridley!
I’ll add Orwell’s six rules of writing:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Well, there were any number of Twain quotes I COULD have given – he being my writing hero and all – but I figured that would be so predictable that I restrained myself!
I like those rules. Basically, we could use those and throw out any other rules for writing without much harm to writing as a whole, don’t you think?
Without much harm to GOOD writing, yes.
Great writing would suffer from strict adherence to rules like “if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”
(For instance, it is possible to cut out the word “outright” from Orwell’s sixth rule, but only a barbarous editor would do it.)
“Be careful of the words you say
To make them short and sweet;
You never know, from day to day
Which ones you’ll have to eat.”
– Anonymous
“If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.” —a needlepoint pillow on the couch of my favorite alcoholic aunt.
Every expression in the least obscure is a fault.
Benjamin Frankin
Wow, that’s mindbender, Mugs.
How about something we can sink our teeth into.
“Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.”
Or, as Dr. Jack Null, my English favorite professor and advisor at Kent State said of Henry James:
“He chewed more than he bit off.”
“If you wouldn’t say it like that, you shouldn’t write it like that.” Cees Buddingh (From Dutch)
And from Elmore “Dutch” Leonard, on writing:
“I leave out the parts that people skip.”
How abous this one [as much for who said it, as for what it says]:
“Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it, and above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.”
~Joseph Pulitzer
“How do I know what I think until I write it?”
—Larry Ragan
Wrong of me… so wrong, but the first quote I thought of:
“Hell is other people.”
Sartre clearly “got” corporate comms, because this quote CLEARLY gets at the whole review/approval process.
“The pen is mightier than the sword…unless, of course, you find yourself in a sword fight.”