Metadata
- Author: Verlyn Klinkenborg
Highlights
Everything in this book is meant to be tested all over again, by you. You decide what works for you. — location: 38
Part of the struggle in learning to write is learning to ignore what isn’t useful to you and pay attention to what is. — location: 39
The only link between you and the reader is the sentence you’re making. — location: 83
Short sentences aren’t hard to make. The difficulty is forcing yourself to keep them short. — location: 79
As opposed to what you mean to say or what you think they’re saying. Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial. — location: 90
Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial. — location: 91
Here’s an experiment: Pay attention to all the noise in your head as you go about writing. — location: 107
What you don’t know and why you don’t know it are information too. — location: 126
Let’s make a simple list from the preceding lines: 1. What you’ve been taught. 2. What you assume is true because you’ve heard it repeated by others. 3. What you feel, no matter how subtle. 4. What you don’t know. 5. What you learn from your own experience. These are the ways we know nearly everything about the world around us. Keep them in mind, especially when you begin to think about what to write and how to write about it. — location: 127
You can say smart, interesting, complicated things using short sentences. How long is a good idea? Does it become less good if it’s expressed in two sentences instead of one? — location: 148
Writing short sentences will help you write strong, balanced sentences of any length. Strong, lengthy sentences are really just strong, short sentences joined in various ways. — location: 173
Writing short sentences restores clarity, the directness of subject and verb. — location: 169
One way to keep sentences short is to keep the space between them as empty as possible. — location: 187
To make short sentences, you need to remove every unnecessary word. — location: 197
See which words the sentence can live without, No matter how inconspicuous they are. — location: 200
Every word is optional until it proves to be essential, — location: 202
The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow, The ability to speak to the reader in silence. — location: 214
That means you don’t know how to use one of a writer’s most important tools: The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow, The ability to speak to the reader in silence. — location: 213
The hard part now is deciding which to kill and which to fix and how to fix them. — location: 226
Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head. — location: 220
Once you can actually see your thoughts and perceptions, It’s surprising how easy it is to arrange them or discover their arrangement. This always comes as a revelation. — location: 233
If you make strong, supple sentences, Improvise, understand and exploit your mistakes, Keep yourself open to the possibilities each sentence creates, Keep yourself open to thought itself, And read like a writer, You can write in any form. — location: 264
You’re also two people, writer and reader. This is a tremendous asset. — location: 282
You can only become a better writer by becoming a better reader. You have far more experience as a reader than you do as a writer. You’ve read millions of words arranged by other writers. How many sentences have you made so far? — location: 283
Writing well and reading well mean paying attention to all the subtleties embodied in a sentence In its exact form and no other. — location: 315
Learning to write begins anywhere, at any time in life. — location: 359
No two sentences are the same unless they’re exactly the same, word for word. — location: 319
Strangely enough, this is how you read when you were a child. Children read repetitively and with incredible exactitude. They demand the very sentence—word for word—and no other. The meaning of the sentence is never a substitute for the sentence itself, Not to a six-year-old. — location: 330
You’re learning to write, gathering materials to write From everything you read as well as everything you write And from everything you notice in the world around you. — location: 356
And if you can get anywhere from anywhere, You can start anywhere And end anywhere. There is no single necessary order. — location: 425