Browsing Topic Best Written Language Quotes

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

The shorter and the plainer the better.

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

This is the power of images, the ambiguity. You are never completely sure of anything. With written language, it’s more concrete. You have to establish some facts, but in movies, you see things happening, and the exact meaning behind the images is more ambiguous.

Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Taste and smell are often the beggars among our five senses – they leave no written language and therefore no standards other than wholly personal ones. Tasting a superlative Moselle wine can be an aesthetic experience no less genuine than hearing a Mozart piano concerto or seeing for the first time an original Breughel painting.

Be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

The chief virtue that language can have is clarity.

Use the smallest word that does the job.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.

Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.

Thoughts are created in the act of writing. [It is a myth that] you must have something to say in order to write. Reality: You often need to write in order to have anything to say. Thought comes with writing, and writing may never come if it is postponed until we are satisfied that we have something to say…The assertion of write first, see what you had to say later applies to all manifestations of written language, to letters…as well as to diaries and journals

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It’s more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.

Literacy, written language is a very late acquisition in terms of human evolution.

In Japan, their written language doesn’t translate to keyboards well. So they have problem communicating with computers, so they really feel that what’s missing from telephones and computer interfaces is this ability to move around in three-space.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

Every big company has some little guy who is an enthusiast off in the corner working on technology. In Japan, it is integrated into their high-level strategy. They see it as a communication medium, because for them, just the words? – ?and this is the problem that they have with Americans? – ?just the words they say to you is not the complete message. Their facial expressions, their body language, there is a lot of context. Also, their written language doesn’t translate to keyboards well.

The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Although spoken English doesn’t obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn’t know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.