Constance Hale QUOTES

1 " The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar. "

2 " Verbose is not a synonym for literary. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

3 " In French printer's jargon, cliche (which mimicked the sound of a mold striking molten metal) was a synonym for stereotype, which in turn evolved from the Greek for "solid impression." A stereotype was a printing plate that duplicated typography and that was used by the printer in lieu of the original.
So a cliche is a word or phrase used over and over again in lieu of the original. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

4 " The English critic George Saintsbury once compared the act of sentence making--the letting out and pulling in of clauses--to the letting out and pulling in of the slide of a trombone or the "draws" of a telescope. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

5 " You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasion—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

6 " Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” wrote George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

7 " Finally, don’t be fooled by words like orientate or commentate, misguided back-formations from orientation and commentator; orient and comment do the job just fine. Don’t use big words to gloss over the truth or to pump air into ideas. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

8 " The most common prepositional error is forgetting that the noun or pronoun in a prepositional phrase is the object of the preposition. The object of the preposition must be expressed in the objective case. Who can forget Jane Russell’s line, in a 1970s Playtex ad, for a bra “for we full-figured gals.” The preposition for mandates the pronoun us. But, then, Russell never was known for her pronouns. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

9 " Jordan, considered strictly as an athlete, is the Second Coming, and Reinsdorf, considered strictly as a mogul, is a second-rater. It’s as if Pat Robertson were making Jesus punch a time card. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

10 " Pronouns are proxies for nouns. They stand in willingly when nouns don’t want to hang around sounding repetitive. The noun (or noun phrase), whose bidding the pronoun does, is called the antecedent—because it goes (ced-) before (ante-) the pronoun in the sentence or paragraph. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

11 " Unlike nouns, a class of words that is forever morphing and mutating, the list of pronouns is finite and predictable, subdividing neatly and changed only slightly since the days of Shakespeare: "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

12 " You’ll most likely find interjections at the beginning of a sentence, followed by a comma or an exclamation point: Ahem! Wake up—this is the last chapter on parts of speech. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

13 " The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind, and they can be seen in the church basement Friday afternoon.” This doozy, culled by Richard Lederer from a church bulletin, is an instance of “obscure pronomial reference,” or, in plain English, a pronoun without a clear antecedent. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

14 " Remember, “being earnest” does not mean mimicking Hemingway. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

15 " Speaking of whose, the one truly unforgivable sin that haunts the use of pronouns is the confusion of whose with who’s and its with it’s. Pronouns, when they get possessive, act weird. We do not say I’s, you’s, he’s, or she’s to indicate possession, so why would we write who’s or it’s? Possessive pronouns are all apostropheless: my, your, his, hers, its. Who’s and it’s are contractions of who is and it is (or who has and it has). Learn this or die. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

16 " Watch out for the mindless slapping together of prefixes on prefixes, suffixes on suffixes—don’t create clunkers like disintermediation, decentralization, effectualization, finalization, scrutinization, and that horrid replacement for “use,” utilization. Enough with the suffix cut-and-paste acts. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

17 " heed Hugh Blair, a very emeritus Edinburgh professor whose advice from 1783 has stood the test of more than two centuries: "Remember . . . every Audience is ready to tire; and the moment they begin to tire, all our Eloquence goes for nothing. A loose and verbose manner never fails to disgust . . . better [to say] too little, than too much. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

18 " To paraphrase Ezra Pound, don't imagine that the art of prose is any simpler than the art of music; spend as much time developing your craft as a pianist spends practicing scales. 'Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint, Pound argued in his 1913 essay, 'A Few Don'ts. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

19 " What would a grammar book be if it didn’t lounge around in a little Latin? Let "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

20 " If you write short, crisp sentences without any sinces or whens or althoughs, try stringing varied sentences together by using subordinate conjunctions. If you already rely on subordinate conjunctions, try rebalancing your sentences with ands and buts and fors and sos. Does the change of conjunctions change your style? "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

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