Writers dream of sentences that sail through the waters of thought. We try to control their shape and … - Constance Hale

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How much do you know about the Heartland War?' Connor shrugs. 'It was the last chapter in our history textbook, but we had state testing, so we never got to it.

Constance Hale

Writers dream of sentences that sail through the waters of thought. We try to control their shape and size, and we struggle to let them glide, rather than thrash at sea.

Control, Dream, Sea, Shape, Struggle

Same Author Quotes

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

Literary, Synonym, Verbose

Some of the worst writing around suffers from inert verbs and the unintended use of the passive voice. Yet the passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason.

Writing, Passive Voice, Arrows, Quiver, Arrow, Reason

A sentence can offer a moment of quiet, it can crackle with energy or it can just lie there, listless and uninteresting. What makes the difference? The verb.

Lying, Differences, Energy, Quiet, Offer, Verb

Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochures and brilliance, memo and memoir, a ship's log and The Old Man and the Sea. The best writers stamp prose with their own distinctive personality; their timbre and tone are as recognizable as their voices on the phone. To cultivate voice, you must listen for the music of language-the vernacular, the syntactic tics, the cadences.

Men, Music, Stamp, Timbre, Voice, Writing

I’m a sucker for this stuff. The @ is called chiocciola (snail) in Italian! The & was once taught as a letter of the alphabet! The manicule has been with us for a millennium! Thank you, Keith Houston, for bringing these little mysteries out of the shadows of typographic history.

Italian, Shadow, Taught, Chiocciola, History