Today's offering is selections from my commonplace book, some of which you may want to post above your desk or, if you do cross stitch, work into a sampler.
"Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it." Henry David Thoreau
"It's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble, it's what we know that ain't so." Will Rogers
"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it." George Bernard Shaw
"Try to preserve an author's style, if he is an author and has a style." Wolcott Gibbs
"You write with ease, to show your breeding, / But easy writing's vile hard reading." Richard Brinsley Sheridan, "Clio's Protest"
"The copy desk was like a sieve for prose: the copy editor filtered out impurities without adding anything new." Mary Norris, Greek to Me
"Copy editors are meant to be gnomes working invisibly below deck to ensure that the engine of prose runs smoothly." Geoff Nunberg, Language Log
"Editing raw copy is like looking at your grandmother naked." Rafael Alvarez, Baltimore Sun
"Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true." Samuel Johnson
"Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage." Thomas Jefferson to John Adams
Languages certainly do follow rules, but they don't follow orders." Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster
"When a grammarian notes that something is wrong, it means that many people are already doing it." Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin
"The public conversation about language is dominated by a kind of middlebrow irascibility, rather than by patient examination of language facts and their consequences." Lane Greene, Talk on the Wild Side
"The history of prescriptivism about English .. is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance." Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars
"The error of ... viewers with alarm is in assuming that there is enough magic in pedagogy to teach 'correct' English to the plain people. There is, in fact, too little; even the fearsome abracadabra of Teachers College, Columbia, will never suffice for the purpose. The plain people will always make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and often without much insight. Their lives would be more comfortable if they ceased to repine over it, and instead gave it some hard study. It is very amusing, and not a little instructive." H.L. Mencken, The American Language
Typo alert: Lane Greene's book is Talk ON the Wild Side. (Jan F. -- can't sign in for some reason.)
ReplyDeleteSome more thoughts.
ReplyDelete‘Omit needless words’ is fine insofar as it goes, but not every word needs to be valiantly needful, and a lot of sentences are better with a little fat or even gristle in them rather than cut to the bone.
– Benjamin Dreyer, at his Substack, 22 May 2024
An unfortunate side effect of editing is that you’ll find it difficult to simply *read* ever again.
– Judith A Tarutz, Technical editing: the practical guide for editors and writers (via Mike Pope)
The basic principle of structure in any kind of prose composition is clarity. If a reader cannot follow your line of argument – or worse, if you have no line of argument – then you have no hope of writing persuasively.
– Steward La Casce & Terry Belanger, The art of persuasion: how to write effectively about almost anything (via Bryan Garner)
Remember the basic rule of editing: When you undertake surgery on someone else’s prose, close things up correctly and count the instruments when you’re finished. Don’t leave a scalpel in the patient. It looks awful on the X-rays.
– Headsup: The Blog, 3 August 2011
Your writing will improve significantly when you look at it not as a vehicle for expressing your ideas but as a vehicle for the reader to gain insight into those ideas.
– Dick Margulis, at Ampersand and Virgule, 26 May 2006
The goal of the editing process is to improve the manuscript, not to perfect it. While many editors are, in terms of personality, perfectionists, the realists among us understand that being a perfectionist is not the same thing as producing perfect work.
– Dick Margulis, at Ampersand and Virgule, 26 May 2006
One encounters people whose acquisition of an infallible understanding of what constitutes ‘proper’ English, evidently by divine afflatus, relieves them of any obligation to attend to argument or examine evidence.
– John E McIntyre, 27 October 2015
And some more thoughts.
ReplyDeleteDespite its critics, though, ‘different to’ is irreversibly a part of the language. That ship has sailed, crossed the ocean, reached its destination, been dismantled, and had its parts used to build houses in which generations of people have lived happy and productive lives.
– Tom Freeman at Stroppy Editor, 28 August 2014
We could, of course, be wrong; possibly no one has studied the matter systematically, just because everyone is pretty sure what the facts are.
– Arnold Zwicky at Language Log, 31 October 2006
Consistency helps the reader, but not when policing consistency means you don’t have time to address more important issues, such as accuracy and clarity.
– Gerri Berendzen, ACES News, 28 April 2014
Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won’t improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another.
– Bruce Holland Rogers, ‘Word Work’ (via Bryan Garner)
This absolute nonsense without a citation remains absolute nonsense without a citation.
– Comment at a blog at discovermagazine.com, 27 August 2014 (original now unavailable)
Readers expect someone to clean the stuff up before it’s published, in the same way they expect someone to have tightened all the loose bits before they buy a car, and they make judgments about quality, professionalism and value accordingly.
– Headsup: The Blog, 4 March 2015
When a recurring word has one meaning prevailing through the same discourse, the writer should not bring it in unexpectedly in one of its other meanings.
– Alexander Bain, ‘English Composition and Rhetoric’ (1877) (via Bryan Garner).