Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Simple and to the point is always the best way to get your point across.

Good communication does not mean that you have to speak in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs. It isn't about slickness. Simple and clear go a long way.

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.

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: and so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow him.

Words easy to be understood do often hit the mark; when high and learned ones do only pierce the air.

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

Simple is the only way I can write.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

My first love was, and remains, manual labor; sowing and harvesting, the pastures, the flock, and the cattle.

I still remember the first acronym I learned, BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. I still try to communicate that way. No reason to dance around getting to the point.

You just can't make bad writing look good. But if you have good writing, you just say it, and it's almost done.

I don't write with a complex style, I cannot.

Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open.

Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative.

Whate'er is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with ease.

Never mistake legibility for communication.

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

Successful writers learn at last what they should learn at first,--to be intelligently simple.

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words.

Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.

I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.