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Less is more.

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Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

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Editors are licensed to be curious.

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Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper....more

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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 thi...more

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Vulnerability has a strength of its own.

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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

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Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

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I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

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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.

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Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.

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Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that y...more

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Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous" (many), "facilitate" (ease), "Individual" (man or...more

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Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the a...more

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Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," ...more