“There are some simple maxims […] which I think might be commanded to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.”

"How I Write", The Writer, September 1954
1950s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There are some simple maxims […] which I think might be commanded to writers of expository prose. First: never use a lo…" by Bertrand Russell?
Bertrand Russell photo
Bertrand Russell 562
logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… 1872–1970

Related quotes

Ben Carson photo
Northrop Frye photo
Dorothy Parker photo

“It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)

Gaston Bachelard photo

“The words of the world want to make sentences.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher

Source: La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie) (1960), Ch. 5, sect. 4

George Orwell photo

“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do.”

"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Context: Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

John Irving photo
Anaximander photo

“There cannot be a single, simple body which is infinite, either, as some hold, one distinct from the elements, which they then derive from it, nor without this qualification.”

Anaximander (-610–-547 BC) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher

As quoted in Physics by Aristotle, as translated by John Burnet http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/burnet/egp.htm?pleaseget=14
Context: There cannot be a single, simple body which is infinite, either, as some hold, one distinct from the elements, which they then derive from it, nor without this qualification. For there are some who make this (i. e. a body distinct from the elements) the infinite, and not air or water, in order that the other things may not be destroyed by their infinity. They are in opposition one to another — air is cold, water moist, and fire hot—and therefore, if any one of them were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time. Accordingly they say that what is infinite is something other than the elements, and from it the elements arise.

Sarah Dessen photo
Laurence Sterne photo
Anton Chekhov photo

Related topics