Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style."

It's always nice to end your sentences with an exclamation mark, and not a comma.

There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't.

The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science.

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

You just can't make bad writing look good. But if you have good writing, you just say it, and it's almost done.

Style matters, but the real force of writing is ideas, not style.

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

Let us not write at a loose rambling rate, in hope the world will wink at all our faults.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.

I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good.

A good author, and one who writes carefully, often discovers that the expression of which he has been in search without being able to discover it, and which he has at last found, is that which was the most simple, the most natural, and which seems as if it ought to have presented itself at once, without effort, to the mind.

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.

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

Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

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