Wise Words on Writing

Quotations on clear, simple writing
Submitted by members of the PLAIN Listserve

"Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators." -- Albert Camus

"Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple." -- C.W. Ceram

"When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind." -- Cicero

"My aim is to make things as simple as possible, but not simpler than that." -- Albert Einstein

"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you're gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing." -- Benjamin Franklin

"Easy reading is damned hard writing." -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

"A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws in hopes he may hit." -- English lexicographer Samuel Johnson

"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." -- Hans Hofman

"To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style." -- Aldous Huxley

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." -- Thomas Mann

"Never use a 50-cent word when a 10-cent word will do." -- An unidentified nun who was the fourth grade teacher of a PLAIN member

"Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific term or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent." -- George Orwell

"As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand, I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet." -- American revolutionary Tom Paine

"I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter." -- Blaise Pascal, "Lettres provincials," letter 16, 1657

"It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas."-- Charles Peguy (1873-1914)

"The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think." -- Edwin Schlossberg

"Only a mediocre writer is always at his best." -- William Somerset Maugham

"I am sorry this is such a long letter, but I did not have the time to write a short one." -- Mark Twain

"Think like a wise man but express yourself like the common people." -- W.B. Yeats

Compiled by Annette Corrigan for PLAIN.

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