Expression Clarity Quotes

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

The specific excellence of verbal expression in poetry is to be clear without being low.

Those who write as they speak, even though they speak well, write badly.

Write with the learned. Pronounce with the vulgar.

No man writes a book without meaning something, though he may not have the faculty of writing consequentially and expressing his meaning.

The whole end of speech is to be understood.

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.

A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

I like how I write better than how I speak.

If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I'll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I'll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.

Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought.

I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. You can see for yourself how many different ways they might be arranged.

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.

I know what I'm trying to say, so I'm always open to learning how to say it.

Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)

As a writer I've learned certain lessons. One of them is to be careful about how you put a view, and to bear in mind how easily and readily you'll be misinterpreted.

Words are a lens to focus one's mind.

I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.

The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.

I have to be clear with myself and very conscious of what I am trying to say. Misunderstandings will always take place; it's unavoidable.

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.

Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.