Building Great Sentences Quotes

“Sentences that bring ideas and images into clearer focus by adding more useful details and explanation are generally more effective than those that are less clearly focused and that offer fewer details.”
― Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

“This is a book in which we will dance with language, not a book in which we will trudge toward remedial correctness.”
― Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

“Strunk and White do a great job of reminding us to avoid needless words, but they don’t begin to consider all of the ways in which more words might actually be needed. My goal will be to explain why, in many cases, we need to add words to improve our writing, as Faulkner so frequently does, rather than trying to pare our writing down to some kind of telegraphic minimum, as is frequently the case with Hemingway.”
― Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

“Strunk concluded his discussion of the mandate to omit needless words with this all-important qualifier: “This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” Strunk’s concern is specifically with words and phrases that do not add propositions to the sentence, phrases like “the reason why is that” used in place of “because,” or “owing to the fact that” in place of “since.” It’s far easier to remember the term simple and direct as a summary of Jacques Barzun’s advice in his Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers than it is to remember that simple does not mean simplistic, direct does not mean short, and simple and direct does not mean that we should all write like Ernest Hemingway in a hurry.”
― Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

“Unless the situation demands otherwise, sentences that convey more information are more effective than those that convey less. Sentences”
― Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

“An assumption exists that long sentences are bad, but it is usually the case that bad sentences are long.”
― Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

“The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed. Erskine”
― Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

“I’m trying to make the point that the basic unit of writing is the proposition, not the word or even a sequence of words, and we build sentences by putting propositions together.”
― Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

“A proposition, which is usually expressed in the form of a sentence, is a statement about reality that can be accepted or rejected.”
― Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read