Stuart Scott Quotes

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Don't appear so scholarly, pray. Humanize your talk, and speak to be understood.

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

Successful writers learn at last what they should learn at first,--to be intelligently simple.

I don't feel like I have to use big words or theories to get my point across. People are like, "Whoa. That's crazy" and make it into this crazy thing.

The shorter and the plainer the better.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.

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

In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

Less is almost always better than more. Short words, short sentences, short speeches.

Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.

I want it to be easy to read. I'm not writing exotic literature.

I don't use a lot of words unnecessarily.

Why say 'utilize' when you can say 'use'?

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.

Uncommon things must be said in common words.

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else.