“Write a Sentence as Clean as a Bone” And Other Advice from James Baldwin

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beauti

The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adul

E. B. White makes the case cogently in The Elements of Style, a book every writer should read once a year, when he suggests trying to rearrange any phrase that has survived for a century

“kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” Basically, he’s talking about the tough decisions that creators must make as they create, as they ruthlessly edit and evolve their creations until they’re as good as they can possibly

E. B. White makes the case cogently in The Elements of Style, a book every writer should read once a year, when he suggests trying to rearrange any phrase that has survived for a century

It helps, I think, to keep hold of something of that older sense of the writer as a carver of sentences. Consider the sentence as a crafted object that will take up space in three dimensions.