Several Short Sentences About Writing

“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

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.

Rushing to notice never works, Nor does trying to notice. Attention requires a cunning passivity.

The way to recover your interest, your discipline, often begins on a small scale, By fixing sentences, working on syntax, Looking for problems in the sentences themselves.

your mind never relinquishes what really matters.

Many people assume there’s an inherent conflict between creativity and a critical, analytic awareness of the medium you work in. They assume that the creative artist works unconsciously And that knowing too much about matters like grammar and syntax diminishes or blunts creativity. This is nonsense. You don’t need to be an expert in grammar and syn

True discipline is remembering and recovering—inventing if necessary—what interests you. If it doesn’t interest you, how could it possibly interest anyone else?

It’s always worth asking yourself if you can imagine saying a sentence And adjusting it until you can. Just as it’s always useful to ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to say?” The answer to that question is often the sentence you need to write down.

At first, what you mean to say will emerge By setting aside the things you don’t mean to say As well as trying to say the thing itself. Learning to do this will take some time.