Quack This Way Quotes

“If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers—not all of whom are modern . . . I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this— becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. So probably the smart thing to say is that lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“Reading is a very strange thing. We get talked to about it and talk explicitly about it in first grade and second grade and third grade, and then it all devolves into interpretation. But if you think about what’s going on when you read, you’re processing information at an incredible rate.

One measure of how good the writing is is how little effort it requires for the reader to track what’s going on. For example, I am not an absolute believer in standard punctuation at all times, but one thing that’s often a big shock to my students is that punctuation isn’t merely a matter of pacing or how you would read something out loud. These marks are, in fact, cues to the reader for how very quickly to organize the various phrases and clauses of the sentence so the sentence as a whole makes sense.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“I believe it is better to pay attention and to try to make your language as beautiful and graceful and adroit as possible.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“My main deficit, at least in terms of nonfiction prose, is I have difficulty of being as clear as I want to be. I have various tricks for working around that and making it kind of charming to watch somebody trying to be clear, but the fact of the matter is, I can’t be clear and compressed in the way that, say, parts of the preface of your dictionary that I liked very much are clear and compressed.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“DFW:  Isn’t verbosity, the term itself, pejorative? Is this not a loaded question? Verbose is not neutral.   BAG:   Why is it bad to have extra words in a sentence?   DFW:  Doesn’t extra, itself, imply . . . It’s very . . . I don’t think verbosity, in terms of using a lot of words, is always a bad thing artistically. In the kind of writing that we’re talking about, there are probably two big dangers. One is that it makes the reader work harder, and that’s never good. The other is that if the reader becomes conscious that she’s having to work harder because you’re being verbose, now she’s apt not only to dislike the piece of writing; she’s apt to draw certain conclusions about you as a person that are unfavorable. So you run the risk of losing kind of both your logical appeal and your ethical appeal.”
― Bryan A. Garner, Quack This Way

“That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it — the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“There’s a Poe thing, right? “One out of one hundred things is discussed at great length because it really is obscure. Ninety-nine out of one hundred things are obscure because they’re discussed at more length than they need to be.”
― Bryan Garner, Quack This Way

“though it’s dreadfully ugly to the ear and why if you think hard about it, “Keep your personal belongings in visual contact at all times” is actually likely to be understood by a smaller percentage of people than, “Please keep an eye on your stuff at all times.”   Nevertheless, there are imperatives behind using the language that way. And some of it is to be antihuman.”
― Bryan Garner, Quack This Way

“BAG: What do you suppose would happen to an American airline, not necessarily American Airlines, but all the airlines use officialese . . . What do you suppose would happen to that airline if you and I were hired to rewrite all their spiels in good, plain, humane English? Would that be a business drag on that company, or would it be good for them?

DFW: I think the really interesting question is why hasn’t this been done before? It would be a fascinating experiment. Here’s my guess. It would be a great marketing device. It would be a way to look different from other airlines. It would sound more human. Right? I mean, we always get these corporations: “We care about you. Therefore, we proactively try to facilitate your growing business needs.” Well, that second clause communicates the opposite of “We care about you” because that second clause isn’t a human-to-human contact.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“People, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. For me, I’ve noodled about this a fair amount because a lot of this sort of language afflicts me. My guess is this: officialese, as spoken by officials, is meant to empty the communication of a certain level of humanity. On purpose. If I’m delivering a press release as an official, I’m speaking not as David Wallace. I’m speaking as the deputy assistant commissioner in charge of whatever. I’m speaking with and for some sort of bureaucratic entity. My guess is one of the reasons why we as a people tolerate, or even expect, this officialese is that we associate it with a different form of communication than interpersonal—Dave and Bryan talking together. That the people who are speaking are in many senses speaking not as human beings but as the larynx and tongue of a larger set of people, responsibilities, laws, regulations, whatever.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“But you overuse the passive voice, you‘re distorting the normal order of the sentences. You’re filling it up, often with prepositions or with forms of the verb to be, which is one of the ways that writing gets flabbed out. And you’re dehumanizing the writing because there’s no agent. Right?. So it immediately becomes more abstract, so the reader’s eyes glaze over quickly.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“It’s also true that we go through cycles. Right? At least in terms of my own work, I’ve gone through three or four of these, and I’m in one now, where it feels as if I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever known. I have no idea what to do. Most of what I want to do seems to me like I’ve done it before. It seems stupid. And except on the days I’m really depressed, I realize that I’ve been through these before. These are actually good—one’s being larval. I’m being larval, right? Or else, I just can’t do this anymore, in which case I’ll find something else to do. And I brood about that a fair amount. But I think the hard thing to distinguish among my friends is who . . . who’s the 45-year-old who doesn’t know what she likes or what she wants to do? Is she immature? Or is she somebody who’s getting reborn over and over and over again? In a way, that’s rather cool.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“I’ve been married a year, and I see it just with my wife. She’ll use a word in a joking way that I appreciate, and three days later I’ll repeat it back to her so we get a little giggle that the two of us can share. And then after a while, we’ve built this strange vocabulary of English words, but that have connotations private to us. It’s a way to cohere, right? What’s interesting . . . Well, in a marriage you don’t share your little language, so there’s no one to irritate. Vogue words tend to irritate people who aren’t in the group that the vogue words are meant to signal inclusion with, possibly because part of their whole point is to exclude people who aren’t in that group.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“There’s the kind of boneheaded explanation, which is that a lot of people with PhDs are stupid, and like many stupid people, they associate complexity with intelligence. And therefore they get brainwashed into making their stuff more complicated than it needs to be. I think the smarter thing to say is that in many tight, insular communities—where membership is partly based on intelligence, proficiency, and being able to speak the language of the discipline—pieces of writing become as much or more about presenting one’s own qualifications for inclusion in the group than transmission of meaning. And that’s how in disciplines like academia—or, I’ve read some really good legal prose, but when it’s really, really horrible (IRS Code stuff)—I think that very often it stems from insecurity and that people feel that unless they can mimic the particular jargon and style of their peers, they won’t be taken seriously, and their ideas won’t be taken seriously. It’s a guess.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“One of the things that the college drummed into me is, “Welcome to the adult world. It doesn’t care about you. You want it to? Make it. Make it care.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“Exercises as boneheaded as you take a book you really like, you read a page of it three, four times, put it down, and then try to imitate it word for word so that you can feel your own muscles trying to achieve some of the effects that the page of text you like did. If you’re like me, it will be in your failure to be able to duplicate it that you’ll actually learn what’s going on.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“The reader cannot read your mind.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it—the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention. Does that make sense?”
― Bryan Garner, Quack This Way

“Let me stop you. I don’t remember your entry on buried verbs. Is that what’s wrong?   BAG:   Yeah, I think they’re unduly abstract.   DFW:  But sometimes, obviously, if you’re referring to litigation, you’ve got to use the buried verb.   BAG:   Right, you can’t always say litigate.   DFW:  Then there’s always the—what do you call it?—buried nouns, like, “We need to dialogue about this,” “You gifted me with this,” which make my stomach hurt even more than the buried verbs. I guess those, a lot of those are more vogue words.   BAG:   Linguists call it functional shift, where you press a noun into service as a verb. Some kinds of functional shift are not so bothersome—using a noun as an adjective, “We’ve got a room problem here,” you know, that kind of thing.   DFW:  But you’re right, yeah, the noun-to-verb thing is more annoying in a vogue-word sense. But you’re right. Buried verbs are a quick way to turn a clean, elegant, simple clause into a clotted nightmare.”
― Bryan Garner, Quack This Way

“DFW:  One answer is the fact that people, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. For me, I’ve noodled about this a fair amount because a lot of this sort of language afflicts me. My guess is this: officialese, as spoken by officials, is meant to empty the communication of a certain level of humanity. On purpose.   If I’m delivering a press release as an official, I’m speaking not as David Wallace. I’m speaking as the deputy assistant commissioner in charge of whatever. I’m speaking with and for some sort of bureaucratic entity. My guess is one of the reasons why we as a people tolerate, or even expect, this officialese is that we associate it with a different form of communication than interpersonal—Dave and Bryan talking together. That the people who are speaking are in many senses speaking not as human beings but as the larynx and tongue of a larger set of people, responsibilities, laws, regulations, whatever. And that is probably why, even”
― Bryan Garner, Quack This Way

“Let me stop you. I don’t remember your entry on buried verbs. Is that what’s wrong?   BAG:   Yeah, I think they’re unduly abstract.   DFW:  But sometimes, obviously, if you’re referring to litigation, you’ve got to use the buried verb.   BAG:   Right, you can’t always say litigate.   DFW:  Then there’s always the—what do you call it?—buried nouns, like, “We need to dialogue about this,” “You gifted me with this,” which make my stomach hurt even more than the buried verbs. I guess those, a lot of those are more vogue words.   BAG:   Linguists call it functional shift, where you press a noun into service as a verb. Some kinds of functional shift are not so bothersome—using a noun as an adjective, “We’ve got a room problem here,” you know, that kind of thing.”
― Bryan Garner, Quack This Way