What writers & others say
“Good writing is good conversation, only more so.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“Get human! Stop trying to speak in a monolithic, generic voice. It’s incredibly difficult to write that way, and it’s even more excruciating to have to read that kind of content. Why make things so hard for yourself and your audience? Just write clearly, in human terms, and don’t be afraid to display diversity and dissent. No one believes a monolithic voice, so it undermines your credibility.”
— Amy Gahran, media consultant
“A writer’s voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer’s voice line the stroke of an artist’s brush — is the thumbprint of her whole person — her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms.”
— Patricia Lee Gauch, author of children’s literature
“The ear, not the eye, is the final editor.”
— Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, in Writing to Deadline
“Effective writing has the illusion of speech without its bad habits. The reader hears a writer speaking to a reader. The writing should flow with grace, pace and clarity — not the way we speak but, better than that, the way we should speak.”
— Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, in Writing to Deadline
“Some amount of personality (the ‘author’s voice’) makes sites more attractive. Users don’t like bland impersonal corporate sites.”
— Jakob Nielsen, “king of usability,” in Alertbox
“I don’t know the rules of grammar… If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”
— David Ogilvy, “the father of advertising”
“Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.”
— Laurence Sterne, novelist and Anglican clergyman
“For many websites, we simply plug in and play the bare technology. All the site visitor sees and feels is the design, the interface, the links and the clicks. The experience is about as warm and human as banking with an ATM machine.”
— Nick Usborne, consultant, User Interface Engineering
“When I started reading my stories aloud for a living and I’d hear myself, I would think, ‘Good heavens, that needs to be pointed up,’ or ‘That should be out.’ Now, as I go to colleges to do readings, I have revised a lot of my early stories so that they read more succinctly. I wish I had learned early on what a good test reading aloud was.”
— Eudora Welty, American author
“Good writers are visible just behind their words.”
— William Zinsser, author, On Writing Well
“What I’m always looking for as an editor is a sentence that says something like ‘I’ll never forget the day when I …’ I think, ‘Aha! A person!'”
— William Zinsser, author, On Writing Well
How long should your message be?
Would your message be twice as good if it were half as long?
Yes, the research says. The shorter your message, the more likely readers are to read it, understand it and make good decisions based on it.
So how long is too long? What’s the right length for your piece? Your paragraphs? Your sentences? Your words?Find out at Rev Up Readability — our clear-writing workshop, starting June 19.
There, you’ll use a cool (free!) tool to analyze your message for 33 readability metrics. You’ll leave with quantifiable targets, tips and techniques for measurably boosting readability.
Save up to $100 with our group discounts.
