Constance Hale > Quotes

“Verbose is not a synonym for literary.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

“The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.”
― Constance Hale

“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

“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 Wicked Good Prose

“Ernest Hemingway once advised prose artists to 'Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

“Remember, “being earnest” does not mean mimicking Hemingway.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“Language offers us a surprising, savage terrain full of pockets and peaks. Shakespeare invented words like crazy. Mark Twain wrote in dialect. Muhammad Ali rapped in rhythmic sentences. Junot Diaz mixes Spanish into his sentences like rum into fruit juice. Nicki Minaj spices her lyrics with slang.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

“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 Wicked Good Prose

“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 Wicked Good Prose

“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 Wicked Good Prose

“The art of sentence making comes down to experimentation, skill, and variety. Just because you can do the three-and-a-half-somersault tuck off the high board doesn’t mean you must ditch the gorgeous swan dive. Good sentences can be short and muscular, and they can be long and graceful.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“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

“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 Wicked Good Prose

“Ernest Hemingway once advised prose artists to “Write hard and clear about what hurts.” It’s good advice. But to follow it, you must stop reading.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“Understanding pitch, and being able to adjust it, is especially valuable in an era when information often trumps insight and the flow of data exceeds our capacity to distill–to make it ours and to make it matter. The computer makes it easy to spew out paragraphs; the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad make it easy to receive them. But we still need to craft our passages. We want narrators–not newsreaders. We desire stories–not brands, press releases, or tweets. We crave writing that is original, passionate, and personal.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“True prose stylists carry on an impassioned lifelong love affair with words, banishing mediocre ones like so many uninteresting suitors, burnishing the good ones till they shimmer. Be infatuated, be seduced, be obsessed.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

“That’s the alchemy of adjectives: boiling down an excess of ideas to the essence of a thing. We want the words to be precise and evocative. If we pick our adjectives carefully, any description can surprise.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“The words must conjure the character of a place for readers who may never see it. This may seem like magic, or incomparable talent, but the inspiration starts with acute observation.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“We can twist poet Alexander Pope’s diktat—“the sound must seem an echo of the sense”—into a caveat for the novice writer: When sound doesn’t echo sense, the writing misfires.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“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

“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 Wicked Good Prose

“The Spanish-born, Paris- and Oxford-educated writer Salvador de Madariaga waxed ecstatic about the beauty of English words in 1928: They are marvellous, those English monosyllables. Their fidelity is so perfect that one is tempted to think English words are the right and proper names which acts are meant to have, and all other words are pitiable failures. How could one improve upon splash, smash, ooze, shriek, slush, glide, squeak, coo? Is not the word sweet a kiss in itself, and what could suggest a more peremptory obstacle than stop?”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“Let’s never forget that we need to speak and write like human beings with hearts, and not like the tin woodsman in The Wizard of Oz or Hal in the movie 2001.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“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 Wicked Good Prose

“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 Wicked Good Prose

“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

“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 Wicked Good Prose

“To find the right pitch is to be human, to have a sense of the street, while still reaching for the lofty. It means resisting the kind of language that suits cogs in a machine better than sentient beings.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“The most common criticism many writers hear from editors is “show, don’t tell.” The dictum is often invoked reflexively, and it can seem opaque. But take it as a warning against frothy adjectives that fail to convey an experience to a reader. “It’s no use telling us that something was ‘mysterious’ or ‘loathsome’ or ‘awe-inspiring’ or ‘voluptuous,’ ” writes C. S. Lewis, echoing the editor’s standard lecture to the newsroom novice. “By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim ‘how mysterious!’ or ‘loathsome’ or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you’ll have no need to tell me how I should react.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

“Phrases can build grace into sentences. Taut declarations lend clarity, but too many of them can start to sound like a Dick-and-Jane story. A strategically placed phrase can turn a staccato burst into a more lyrical sentence. This is what we mean by “turning a phrase”—using our command of language and our mastery of the rhythms of a sentence to affect style as well as substance”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose