My sentences almost never come out right at first, and I endlessly try to repair them.

I’ve never let my writing define my life; I want to be a person first and then a writer. I’ve never worked at night or on weekends.

That, finally, is the life-changing message of On Writing Well: Simplify your language and thereby find your humanity.

In those books I learned to gather hundreds of facts and to let those facts speak for themselves, unvarnished. I learned to generate emotion by getting other people to tell me things they felt strongly about, not by waxing emotional myself. I learned not to wax. Those

We sat and talked about books and authors, and I gave my best impersonation of a model tenant, a man whose checks wouldn’t bounce and who wouldn’t cause any fuss.

I typed the usual something: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” Or maybe it was the one about the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy sleeping dog, which uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. I don’t think I did “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs,” that printer’s darling, which uses the 26 letters more succin

I also tried to stop using phrases like “of course” and adverbs like “surprisingly,” “predictably,” “understandably” and “ironically,” which place a value on a sentence before the reader has a chance to read it. Readers, I learned, are not as dumb as the writer thinks; they must be given room to play their role in the act of writing—to discover for

And, like many modern people—modern women, especially—I had catapulted out of my context…The successes [of the writers] gave me hope, of course, yet it was the desperate bits I liked best. I was looking for directions, gathering clues.

“What our readers hunger for,” I was told by Clifton Fadiman, a pillar of the club’s board of judges from 1944 until his death in 1999, “is books that explain. William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich explained a whole age to us.” A majority of the club’s biggest sellers, Fadiman pointed out, have been books that readers found helpf