Jami Attenberg Quotes

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

Names and other proper nouns shouldn't distract from the language.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

I enjoy finding the right word and giving each its full measure, its full space in a sentence.

I still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.

I am a stickler for damn good writing.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

I'm very bad at ending sentences. A lot times I just want to say, 'That's the end of my sentence. I have nothing more to say.'

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.

One mistake with beginners in writing is, that they think it important to spin out something long. It is a great deal better not to write more than a page or two, unless you have something to say, and can write it correctly.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

In my experience, copy editors, like the stalwart staff I've worked with and learned from in my 34 years at 'TIME,' are linguistic conservatives - the keepers of the flame ignited by the Strunk-White 'Elements of Style,' published in full in 1957 and chosen by 'TIME' as one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the past century.

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 leave my editor to put the periods and commas in.

I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.

I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing mistake.

Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.