How to write the perfect sentence
Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone’. What can we learn from celebrated authors about the art of writing well?
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Noisy. Hysterical. Brash. The textual version of junk food. The selfie of grammar. The exclamation point attracts enormous amounts of flak...
What makes writing more readable?
Looking at how to make writing easier to read
«Writing text that can be understood by as many people as possible seems like an obvious best practice. But from news media to legal guidance to academic research, the way we write often creates barriers to who can read it. Plain language—a style of writing that uses simplified sentences, everyday vocabulary, and clear structure—aims to remove those barriers.»
Why Write? - The Paris Review
“I’ve been collecting these theories of why writers write because so many writers have written about it.”
«I encountered Joan Didion’s famous line about why she writes—“entirely to find out what I’m thinking”»
The death of literature
We have fallen out of love with good writing
«The paradox of this mystic inner quality is that its depth gets expressed by what we think of as a superficial quality: style.»
How to Write Usefully
February 2020What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should…
«Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.»
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