Lynne Truss Quotes

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

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.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

Many writers profess great exactness in punctuation who never yet made a point.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language.

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?

The single most important lesson of effective communication is this: Focus on clarity. Concentrate on precisions. Don’t worry about constructing beautiful sentences. Beauty comes from meaning, not language. Accuracy is the most effective style of all.

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

Multitudes of words are neither an argument of clear ideas in the writer, nor a proper means of conveying clear notions to the reader.

I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.

You say what you have to say. But you have to learn to say it in such a way that the reader can see what you mean.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.

So what's the point of using words nobody else knows or can say comfortably? I just don't understand that.

No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

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

I've always wanted to work for, like, "Assume your audience is cleverer than you," rather than the other way around.

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.

True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.

The rules of grammar exist in large part to permit readers and writers to operate from a shared set of expectations.