Several Short Sentences About Writing

Learn to distrust words like “genius,” “inspiration,” “flow,” “natural,” and “organic” when you think about your work. (Don’t use them when you talk about it either.)

“How will I know when to stop revising?” You may not be able to tell yet whether your revisions are really improvements. So revise toward brevity—remove words instead of adding them. Toward directness—language that isn’t evasive or periphrastic. Toward simplicity—in construction and word choice. Toward clarity—a constant lookout for ambiguity. Towa

The familiarity with which we know our own lives is sometimes disabling. Writing is a special instance of that. In responding to your own prose, you’re responding in some sense to yourself, And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible to yourself, Camouflaged by familiarity. One basic strategy for revision is becoming a stranger to what

Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial. It’s easier to tell what you’re saying in a short sentence.

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.

One of the hardest things about learning to read well is learning to believe that every sentence has been consciously, purposely shaped by the writer. This is only credible in the presence of excellent writing.

All writing is revision.

You may notice, as you write, that sentences often volunteer a shape of their own And supply their own words as if they anticipated your thinking. Those sentences are nearly always unacceptable, Dull and unvarying, yielding only a small number of possible structures And only the most predictable phrases, the inevitable clichés.

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

Proof is for mathematicians. Logic is for philosophers. We have testimony.