“Often as you move comments around and have similar comments adjacent to each other, you find that half of the words can be cut out. Because a sentence says it all if the sentence is in just the right place.”

— Ward Cunningham

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Collective Ownership of Code and Text
Context: Often as you move comments around and have similar comments adjacent to each other, you find that half of the words can be cut out. Because a sentence says it all if the sentence is in just the right place. On Ward's wiki, the process has been called "refactoring," which is what we call the process in software. Ward's wiki is about software and it has software people on it, so they call it refactoring. Anyplace else it would probably be called editing. So on Ward's wiki, refactoring is an ongoing process. The assumption is that when something turns out to not be ideal, it will be refactored again. Everything is subject to refactoring.

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Ward Cunningham 69

American computer programmer who developed the first wiki 1949

Patti Callahan Henry American writer

Source: Coming Up for Air

“Just as you can practice three - word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.”

Stanley Fish (1938) American academic

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 5, The Subordinate Style, p. 48

“I try to catch every sentence, every word you and I say, and quickly lock all these sentences and words away in my literary storehouse because they might come in handy.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act II
The Seagull (1896)

“I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 2, Simplicity, p. 12.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2
Context: I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume I; lecture 1, "Atoms in Motion"; section 1-2, "Matter is made of atoms"; p. 1-2
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Source: The Plague of Doves

“It's fascinating. You know all these words, and they’re all English, but when you string them together into sentences, they just don’t make any sense.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Variant: It’s fascinating. You know all these words, and they’re all English, but when you string them together into sentences, they just don’t make any sense.
Source: City of Fallen Angels

“I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.”

Jennifer Donnelly A Northern Light

Source: A Northern Light

“Often as you move comments around and have similar comments adjacent to each other, you find that half of the words can be cut out. Because a sentence says it all if the sentence is in just the right place.”

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Ward Cunningham 69

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