Sublime

your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.16

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

President Carter signed an executive order directing that federal regulations be written “simply and clearly.” President Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, urged the nation’s lawyers to replace “a lot of legalese” with “small, old words that all people understand”—words like “right” and “wrong” and “justice.”

Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive, an amplification, or an illustrative quotation.

And so on.

Weaver was a professor of rhetoric.

When you use a quotation, start the sentence with it. Don’t lead up to it with a vapid phrase saying what the man said.