James Baldwin: “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.”

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

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.