Michael Hastings Quotes

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.

I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.

Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in making my prose even more clear and direct, and in avoiding complicated digressions.

You should make it hard on yourself to write so you’re easier to read.

With great writing, there is great clarity.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

If you're creating an entertainment site, you want the content to be the star.

Omit needless words.

Newspaper reporting is really storytelling. We call our articles 'stories,' and we try to tell them in a way that even people who don't know all the background can understand them.

When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.

You have to keep your audience in your mind; if you're writing stuff that you know nobody's going to care about then you should rethink what you're doing!

I have a simple rule: when I'm on TV, I'm not talking to just my anchor or my colleague on my right. I'm talking to America. I look into the lens, and in my head, I'm talking to somebody in Nebraska. Why Nebraska? Why the Cornhusker State? I have no idea. But it feels like it's a good place to talk to people.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.

My purpose in public address and in speech is really encapsulated in three C's: clear, concise, correct. No overblowing rhetoric or anything like that. As simple as possible: clear, concise, correct.

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.

I would rather speak to 500 men that would give me their attention that to 100,000 that would not.

Sustentative ideas are more important than applause lines. Substance makes speeches.

We should not write so that it is possible for [the reader] to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

I prefer the plain and simple sentences: the ones that you don't notice because you're so interested in what's happening to the people and events that the sentences are creating.

People who want to express themselves effectively can learn a lot from the hard-won concision of the copywriter.

For SpringHill, it's always important that the content find the right platform, not the other way around.

We have to find ways to create content that folks want to see.

Our responsibility is to deliver the most compelling content to our players. and if we do that, the audiences are there.