Mark Twain said that the two most
important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out
why. For Twain, obviously, the reason
was to write and he had a lot to say about how to use words, not the least
being that you should write using plain, simple language, short words and brief
sentences.
While he was not averse to having
nice things said about his writing, he abhorred flowery adjectives in those
descriptions just as he disdained using them in his own writing. “Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and
verbosity creep in,” he advised. “When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I
don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable.
They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide
apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened
upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”
And
while he was pleased when he coined a word or phrase that others liked to use (mentioning that it came from him, of course), he also noted that the use of
“a pregnant pause” also could be a great writing style. “The right word may be effective,” he wrote,
“but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”
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