always remember
It’s so much easier to sit back and critique people who put themselves out there than it is to develop a viable skill of your own and then put that out there.
Other than your skill of critiquing other people, I mean.
1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”
5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis on writing, joining other sage writing advice from Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Wilder, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, and David Ogilvy.
(via explore-blog)
Love this series of writers on writing from Brain Pickings.
(via alycegilligan)
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