Several Short Sentences About Writing

Highlights

Everything in this book is meant to be tested all over again, by you. You decide what works for you.

The premise of this book is that most of the received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but harmful. This is not an assumption. It’s a conclusion.

What I’ve learned about writing I’ve learned by trial and error, which is how most writers have learned.

There are innumerable ways to write badly. The usual way is making sentences that don’t say what you think they do.

Let’s make a simple list from the preceding lines: 1. What you’ve been taught. 2. What you assume is true because you’ve heard it repeated by others. 3. What you feel, no matter how subtle. 4. What you don’t know. 5. What you learn from your own experience. These are the ways we know nearly everything about the world around us. Keep them in mind, especially when you begin to think about what to write and how to write about it.

1. Many people assume there’s a correlation between sentence length and the sophistication or complexity of an idea or thought—even intelligence generally. There isn’t.