Sublime

Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.

True to his word, Perkins described for Miss Lemmon a typical workday: Tuesday, July 29, 1935. As always, Max said, he began with the heap of mail waiting on his desk.

Because I’m a former engineer, let me list the bits constituting those eleven (possibly extraneous, currently under investigation) pages below. And also, I am going to italicize the bits in which meaningful action occurs,

Another moral is to look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people. Look at signs and at billboards and at all the junk written along the American roadside. Read the labels on our packages and the instructions on our toys, the claims on our medicines and the graffiti on our walls.

i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can thin

I recommend reading more accessible authors: Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski and Ernest Hemingway, Joyce Carol Oates and Sandra Cisneros and Sally Rooney. These authors write clear, concise, simple sentences. These authors write like copywriters.

The following passage by Enrique Hank Lopez, “Back to Bachimba,”