"The surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definitive, and concrete. The greatest writers - Homer, Dante, Shakespeare - are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures."

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Source : "The Elements of Style". Book by William Strunk Jr. Chapter II: "Elementary Principles of Composition", 1918.

William Strunk, Jr.

#Details Quotes #Attention Quotes #Matter Quotes

“A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.”
“When you are enthusiastic about what you do, you feel this positive energy. It's very simple.”
“The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.”
“I thought that I would like to be affiliated with some school or institution. As time went on, I also decided on the subject that I wanted to get involved with in addition to music: it was Black Studies.”
“It's better to solve the right problem approximately than to solve the wrong problem exactly.”
“There must be religion. When that ligament is torn, society is disjointed and its members perish... [T]he most important of all lessons is the denunciation of ruin to every state that rejects the precepts of religion.”

Source : "Collections of the New-York Historical Society" by I. Riley, 1821.
“I keep to a minimum dialect, in-jokes about football (soccer) teams and soap opera characters, so as not to lose North American readers.”
“I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.”

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