On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction

No rule, however, is harder to follow. It requires writers to do two things that by their metabolism are impossible. They must relax, and they must have confidence.

Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves, as if they were working on any other project that requires logic:

The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds—a person assailed by many forces competing for attention.

Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual—it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain. Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read.

Countless careers rise or fall on the ability or the inability of employees to state a set of facts, summarize a meeting or present an idea coherently.

Just because they’re writing fluently doesn’t mean they’re writing well.

Leaders who bob and weave like aging boxers don’t inspire confidence—or deserve it. The same thing is true of writers. Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

But all of them are vulnerable and all of them are tense. They are driven by a compulsion to put some part of themselves on paper, and yet they don’t just write what comes naturally. They sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write. The problem is to find the real m

Beware, then, of the long word that’s no better than the short word: