Earl Sweatshirt Quotes

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

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don't put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn't say in real life.

I preferred the simplest vocabulary.

I write in quite a simple way because that's just the way I write. The vocab I use is quite wee. That's just the way I talk.

It's so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned - mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill - that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against jargon, both of which are so insidious.

I think the best writers use the language they use every day when they talk to friends. When we talk to each other, we tend to talk in short grabs rather than in long flowing sentences. I think that's not a bad way to write.

When I write legally, I try to write very plain, very vanilla, very clear.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

My style is colloquial storytelling. It's the way we tell stories to one another - it's not writerly, it's not overdone.

Don't appear so scholarly, pray. Humanize your talk, and speak to be understood.

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

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.

John Bunyan, while he had a surpassing genius, would not condescend to cull his language from the garden of flowers; but he went into the hayfield and the meadow, and plucked up his language by the roots, and spoke out in the words that the people used in their cottages.

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

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.

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.

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

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

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.

I've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

I analyse in my own way, in very simple, no-jargon language. If somebody is talking in very complicated way, I never like that.