Quotations: Language and Writing

The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

I must say, though, that anyone who wants to avoid reading his [Richard Wagner's] prose has my sympathy. He writes like an autodidact, with flowery expressions, a vocabulary intended to impress, unnecessary abstractions and elaborate sentence structures....One forms the conviction that the prose was improvised, poured out without forethought or discipline--that when Wagner embarked on each individual sentence he had no idea how it was going to end. Many passages are intolerably boring. Some do not mean anything at all. It always calls for sustained effort from the reader to pick out meaning in the cloud of words. Often one has to go on reading for several pages before beginning to descry, like solid figures in a mist, what it is he is saying."

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

A writer is one for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

The fight against bad English is not frivolous.

I find the stance of the Ignorant to be repugnant, not only intellectually, but morally.

I despise the attitude that I must forgive the failings of those who are so lazy that they can not learn the basic spelling and use of their native language. It is disgusting that anyone has ever defended the crass flatulus of these people as legitimate expression. To write decently is not a task of insurpassable difficulty, it requires only that most human of all traits -- desire. If you desire to be understood, you must communicate. If you desire to convince, you must communicate expressively, eloquently, and with full command of the English language. Even in these days of television (and other stupidities), to communicate with people in positions of power and responsibility you must write and speak well. Here on the 'net, you are ONLY what you write.

Scott M. Hampton

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Indeed a friend who went to the school with me once remarked that after reading Usenet for a week he was glad he had gone to a school that included grammar and spelling in the teaching.

Reading trash all the time makes it impossible for anyone to be anything but a seond-rate person.