Claude C. Hopkins Quotes

A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written.

When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them.

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.

I'm not an angry person. When I write, the lawyer in me tries to make it as easy to read as possible.

A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax; no greater liability than a command of language.

The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.

Every man should study conciseness in speaking; it is a sign of ignorance not to know that long speeches, though they may please the speaker, are the torture of the hearer.

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words.

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.

There are two kinds of speeches: the Mother Hubbard speech, which, like the garment, covers everything but touches nothing, and the French bathing suit speech, which covers only the essential points.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which throw a flying bridge across a chasm of misunderstanding and make contact between mind and mind.

Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood.

To communicate, put your words in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.

A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.

Do but take care to express yourself in a plain, easy Manner, in well-chosen, significant and decent Terms, and to give a harmonious and pleasing Turn to your Periods: study to explain your Thoughts, and set them in the truest Light, labouring as much as possible, not to leave them dark nor intricate, but clear and intelligible.

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

Good communication does not mean that you have to speak in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs. It isn't about slickness. Simple and clear go a long way.

If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.

Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

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 would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.

In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it’s mediated by a kind of text - there’s an electricity about it.