Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist’s head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.
I’m often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task–the day’s work–and not with some enjoyment.
The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.
Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.
…being “rather unique” is no more possible than being rather pregnant.
Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.
Even a poor translator couldn’t kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
If a philosophical writer cannot be followed, the difficulty of his subject can be placed only in mitigation of his offense, not in condonation of it. There are too many expert witnesses on the other side.
But on the question of who you’re writing for, don’t be eager to please.
It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it’s usually because the writer hasn’t be careful enough.
It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it’s usually because the writer hasn’t been careful enough
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
Writing can be taught or learned in the vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: “This is a how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.
It’s no fun to think about infinity and no cinche to write about it. Again, it helps to look for some human link.
I never think of him as a scholar assaulting me with how much he knows, but as a teacher eager to share a lifelong passion for the subject.
Was the whole matter of aptitudes a myth – a copout used by people like me to avoid subjects that would force us to think inTherefore threatening ways?
The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.