“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.”
– Mark Twain
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida,
MO in 1835, 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.
He was pleased when he coined a word
or phrase that others liked to use (mentioning that it came from him, of
course) and 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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