Roger Ascham Quotes

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

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.

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

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

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.

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

Sound judgment is the ground of writing well.

Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

Anything works, as long as you write it properly.

Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.

I think what's really hard is making sense and making what you write clear and smooth-flowing.

People who think well, write well

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good.

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.

In general, what is written must be easy to read and easy to speak; which is the same.

You don't have to say everything to say something.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.

You can't be a good writer without being a good thinker.