Several Short Sentences About Writing

To make short sentences, you need to remove every unnecessary word. Your idea of necessary will change as your experience changes. The fact that you’ve included a word in the sentence you’re making Says nothing about its necessity. See which words the sentence can live without, No matter how inconspicuous they are. Every word is optional until it p

Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial. It’s easier to tell what you’re saying in a short sentence.

The central fact of your education is this: You’ve been taught to believe that what you discover by thinking, By examining your own thoughts and perceptions, Is unimportant and unauthorized. As a result, you fear thinking, And you don’t believe your thoughts are interesting, Because you haven’t learned to be interested in them.

“How will I know when to stop revising?” You may not be able to tell yet whether your revisions are really improvements. So revise toward brevity—remove words instead of adding them. Toward directness—language that isn’t evasive or periphrastic. Toward simplicity—in construction and word choice. Toward clarity—a constant lookout for ambiguity. Towa

Concentration, attention, excitement, will be part of your working state. Daily. Flow, inspiration—the spontaneous emission of sentences—will not. That distinction is worth keeping in mind.

The reader’s experience of your prose has nothing to do with how hard or easy it was for you to make. You’re not writing for a reader in the mirror whose psychological state reflects your own. You have only your own working world to consider. The reader reads in another world entirely.

your mind never relinquishes what really matters.

Pursue clarity instead. In the pursuit of clarity, style reveals itself. Your clarity will differ from anyone else’s without your intending to make it differ. Years later, looking back over your collected works, You can contemplate your style at leisure. But for now you have more important things to think about.

The familiarity with which we know our own lives is sometimes disabling. Writing is a special instance of that. In responding to your own prose, you’re responding in some sense to yourself, And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible to yourself, Camouflaged by familiarity. One basic strategy for revision is becoming a stranger to what