Accessible Writing Quotes

I really connect to strong feminist writers that make their ideas accessible for the rest of the world.

Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.

People who don't normally read make an exception for my books, possibly because they're short.

Clearly, one does not have to give up being an academic, retreat from rigorous research, or renounce the importance of specialization in order to address major social issues. I don't think you give up theoretical rigor by writing in a way that addresses major social concerns and is at the same time accessible to wider informed general audiences.

Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.

Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.

The subject for a lot of non-fiction is very emotional, but if you read it, it's the most boring, dry stuff. I wanted 'Torn Apart' to be extremely accessible and readable.

I am not a great fan of serious, heavy writing. I prefer simple, short sentences, light on prose.

Sometimes you read something and it's just -- it doesn't invite a reader....Sometimes you read something and it's not saying, 'oh come in, come in have a seat. I'm going to tell you what happened.' Perhaps my writing comes off as conversational...and that takes effort.

The Constitution was written by 55 educated and highly intelligent men in Philadelphia in 1787, but it was written so that it could be understood by people of limited education and modest intelligence.

The only thing that makes a book YA is that it is about teenagers, and it is written in a very conventional, non-artsy, non-pretentious way. YA is not the place for the oblique or the cryptic. If it is in any way experimental in form, it is not YA.

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.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

I like contemporary, bare-boned writing. I don't like having the language that I barely understand get in the way of me interpreting it over to an audience. It's this barrier that I don't want to have to attack.

There are writers who pour out words, concepts that sound really important but that basically say nothing. I always tried to be as concise as possible, all to try and reach everyone, but especially the simple people, those who needed to be reached more than anyone else.

I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.

I write to the vulgar more than the learned.

I wanted to be able to write in the voice that I talk to my friends and assume that everybody would know what I was talking about.

Through the years, I have always enjoyed anything Chuck Swindoll has written. When I first got into writing Chuck's books really modeled a style of writing that I thought was accessible to people and yet still biblical. I wanted to do that.

I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for a tiny elite, then that surely should sound alarm bells.

I've learned about marrying poetry and prose and making both accessible.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Years and years ago, I said I did not want to write academic books. I want to write books that are in the language of the common person so that Joe, who didn't even go to college, can sit down and read my book and get it and apply it to his life.

The virtue of books is to be readable.

From Graham Greene, I learnt how to be an accessible writer who grapples with our doubts as sentient individuals.