Lawrence Bragg Quotes

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.

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.

Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

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.

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

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

The shorter and the plainer the better.

Those who write clearly have readers.

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

Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, comes from clear thinking. Think simple.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

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

Easy reading requires hard writing.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

I see but one rule: to be clear.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

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.