Paula LaRocque > Quotes

“Pathos is sad and inspires pity, but is not very interesting because there is nothing to learn from it; the audience experiences mostly pity and futility.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“A heroic figure, larger than life, noble, promising, multidimensional, has a flaw, a “fatal flaw,” that brings about his or her downfall. The flaw often involves some form of hubris, which is Greek for “wanton insolence,” and causes the hero to transgress or ignore natural law, rule, more, or convention. The hero’s flaw may be pride, ambition, greed, lust, jealousy, a desire for revenge, naiveté. Whatever, he or she fails to see consequence. The tragic hero is his own victim.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“The purpose of a dictionary is to help the reader discern what someone might have meant by a given word. Dictionaries are more descriptive than prescriptive. They generally don’t try to say what is right, just what is. Many include usage notes where they can, but obviously space constraints apply—they have their work cut out for them simply dealing with the huge English lexicon. In other words, definitions are not like grammar, which changes very little if at all. Usage is not so much a matter of right and wrong as it is acceptable and questionable.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“one hallmark of intellect is the ability to simplify, to make the complex easy to understand. Anyone can be unclear. The way to credibility is to speak and write plainly without language that bewilders or misleads.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“Special effects aside, we’ll write clearer, cleaner, and more energetic sentences if we fill them with nouns, verbs, and adverbs rather than with prepositions and prepositional phrases.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“The worst description I ever read was by a best-selling novelist who sized up World War II this way: “The war was just terrible.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“Prepositions are vital, of course. What would we do without in, of, by, for, on, and so forth? But as useful as those compact little words are, they must be limited and controlled or they’ll fill the sentence with chaff, disrupt its flow, and force its rhythms into an annoying singsong.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“Writers sometimes don’t realize that an inherently dramatic tale is made even more dramatic through focus, purpose, compression, and underwriting. They often overwrite the dramatic story, which paradoxically drains it of its strength.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“Obviously, we can’t cut all prepositions, nor should we try. But keeping them to a minimum offers a quick route to clarity, simplicity, and brevity.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“Sometimes intensifiers such as very are simply inflationary—a way of exclaiming instead of explaining: Original: The funds for the multilingual program are necessary given how very diverse the district is. Better: Funding the multilingual program is necessary given the district’s diversity. Best: Funding the multilingual program is necessary because the district’s students speak more than a dozen languages.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“Unnecessary repetition, redundancies, and near redundancies also contribute to wordiness. For example: basic fundamentals (fundamentals); consensus of opinion (consensus); potential promise (potential); past history (history); personal friendship (friendship); total effect (effect); end result (result).”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“much.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“Good description is fast, spare, specific, and showing. Weak description is slow, wordy, vague, abstract, and telling.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“If we describe something as very beautiful, then it’s probably beyond beautiful—maybe it’s exquisite.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“(If the expected does not occur—in event, reward, or punishment—the work may seem lacking in artistic unity, coherence, and integrity and can sorely surprise or disappoint the audience.)”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“A useful guideline is to limit to three the numbers in a sentence—three seems to be all the reader’s brain can”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“If it’s very ugly, maybe it’s hideous?”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“The vague qualifiers in those examples are chaff, a habit of conversation—um, ah, ahem! They add nothing. Happy, for example, is a strong, clear word, but if it’s not enough, overjoyed, thrilled, or ecstatic has a precision that “very happy” lacks.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“The reason very and its siblings—extremely, totally, completely, wholly, entirely, utterly, really, quite, rather, somewhat, slightly, fairly, etc.—are useful in speech is that they help us get closer to our meaning when we can’t think of the perfect word. If we can’t instantly call to mind the right word, we fortify the less-than-right word with an intensifier such as very, extremely, totally, wholly, entirely, utterly, really, or completely. Or we tame it with quite, rather, slightly, fairly, or somewhat. Writing, however, lets us review, reconsider, and revise. We can find the right word for our context and let it stand alone—rather”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on a wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
― Paula LaRocque, The Book on Writing