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Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser QUOTES

Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser QUOTES

1 " Test the power of your own arrangement of words with these exercises: 1. For fun, take a paragraph with five or six sentences and reformat it so that each sentence exists on a single line. Examine each sentence to see which words and phrases appear in the beginning, middle, and end. 2. Try to identify the main clause, a group of words that could stand independently as a sentence. There may be more than one. If there is just one, where does it appear: closer to the beginning or the end? 3. For each clause, notice the position of the subject and verb. In general, the closer they are together, and the closer both are to the beginning, the easier the sentence will be to read. 4. Notice the language you save for the end of your sentences, especially the end of the paragraph. Even if the subject and verb come early, you can save something special for the end. Be alert for interesting language that gets lost in the middle of a sentence or paragraph. Can you move it to the beginning or end, where it will get more attention? "

― Roy Peter Clark , Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser

2 " Open this book to a random page. With a pencil, mark any word or phrase that you think does not contribute to the meaning of a passage or chapter. 2. Pick another page. As an exercise, imagine that you have been assigned to cut 10 percent. Mark the candidates for deletion. "

― Roy Peter Clark , Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser