Writing
Clutter is the laborious phrase that has pushed out the short word that means the same thing.
William Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Time is the best editor.
If you have it, time is the easiest trick for self-editing. Simply put your work away long enough so when you come back to it you can see it with fresh eyes.
I find that it’s in this search for aesthetic satisfaction that so many of the best lessons are found. I’m not talking about ornamentation or bells and whistles. I’m taking about the beauty of the four Cs: Clarity, cohesion, consistency, and conciseness.
A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. If you can trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and you can start focusing on what is important: The content, the argument and the ideas. By
Sönke Ahrens • How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking
Why writing needs frameworks and structure
writing wasn’t easy and wasn’t fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
William Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your mind and then trying to retrieve it from there.
Sönke Ahrens • How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking
“Repurpose“
When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything wi... See more
James Somers • More People Should Write
Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize.
William Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
I would argue that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing—the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words. If the moment of quickening is to come, it comes at the level of the paragraph.