William Strunk Jr. Quotes

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.

Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with 'I know that's not a real word,' hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.

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

I could go on and on and on about how we use the word 'place' in so many different ways. About how somebody might ask you 'Where you at?' And they're not asking where are you sitting, where are you living, they're asking: 'How are you doing?

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

I'm a 'frotteur,' someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing.

Choose each word as a precision tool. Consider how it sounds, not how it reads.

People talk in ungrammatical, unwriterly ways.

I'm one of those people who writes out words. All of my text messages? You can read them. Everyone would know what I'm trying to say. My sister will say 'BTW.' Do you mean 'by the way'? Is that what you're trying to say?

I really like language - and slang in particular, and just the shorthand we use when we communicate with people.

Write the way you talk. Naturally.

The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.

Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.

George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.

I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.

You would not serve junk food at a banquet, and your book must be a banquet. Get your language from Swift, not from Shopsy's.

If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.

The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

It should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons" - and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their deathbed, I shall certainly save it up for my own.

It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters.

Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'

You don't want to get that sort of sound in your writing that boing that gives you away.

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

It is indeed acceptable practice to sometimes split an infinitive. If infinitive-splitting makes available just the shade of meaning you desire or if avoiding the separation creates a confusing ambiguity or patent artificiality, you are entitled to happily go ahead and split!