Margaret Heffernan Quotes

Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.

Words are powerful. When I make mistakes I just try to come back and clarify what I meant.

How or by what magic is it, that we convey our thoughts to one another with such case and accuracy?

The more clearly you write, the more easily and surely you will be understood.

I know words sometimes have consequences, but I try to choose the correct words every time.

One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.

Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.

Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

Words are like eyeglasses they blur everything that they do not make clear.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.

It's important to be precise about words, because of the thought value of them-they frame and shape so much of the way we understand things.

Crystal-clear thinking is one of the things we look for - not a fancy slide pitch, but crystal-clear thinking.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

I try to be as clear as I can be.

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.