Terry Pratchett Quotes

The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn't realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself.

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.

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.

I really like grammar. And spelling. I was a spelling-bee kid. I'm hard-core about grammar.

Ladies, if you want to know the way to my heart... good spelling and good grammar, good punctuation, capitalize only where you are supposed to capitalize, it's done.

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.

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.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.

I think my writing has become "cleaner."

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.

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

Don't you think that's the main reason people find [writing] so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn't that the only reason they find writing hard: they don't know or care about anything?

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

Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules."

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

If I went back to college again, I'd concentrate on learning to write and to speak before an audience . Nothing is more important than the abillity to communicate effectively.

It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.

Disorganizatio n is the enemy of good writing.

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

Command of English, spoken or written, ranks at the top in business. Our main product is words, so a knowledge of their meaning and spelling and pronunciation is imperative. If a man knows the language well, he can find out about all else.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?