Jeg har gledet meg til denne luken. Les disse tre utdragene godt og nøye! De er noe av det beste jeg har lest om språk og skriving, noensinne. Jeg trykker dem til brystet og blir selvfølgelig rasende for at jeg ikke er i nærheten av å tenke like klart som Verlyn Klinkenborg, i boken Several short sentences about writing (bare navnet på denne boken 🤤). Men det er også god motivasjon. Det er godt å bli desperat av hvor suverent andre mennesker skriver – da har vi noe å strekke oss etter.

Om å stole på den du skriver til:

«Imagine a reader you can trust. This sounds like a simple imperative. But the difference between writing for the reader implicit in your education, and writing for one you trust, is the difference between writing clumsily, using all the grappling hooks of transition and false logic, and writing well, able to move briskly and freely, going anywhere from anywhere almost instantly.

All your life you’ve been reading books that trusted you, trusted your intelligence, your keenness, your ability to feel an invisible wink, to follow any trail, even while you were learning in school not to trust the reader.»

Om hvor poenget i en tekst bør være:

«Writing isn’t a conveyer belt bearing the reader to ‘the point’ at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed. Good writing is significant everywhere, delightful everywhere.»

Om å antyde, uten å si det:

«Without extraneous words or phrases or clauses, there will be room for implication. The longer the sentence, the less it’s able to imply, and writing by implication should be one of your goals. Implication is almost nonexistent in the prose that surrounds you, the prose of law, science, business, journalism, and most academic fields. It was nonexistent in the way you were taught to write.

That means you don’t know how to use one of a writer’s most important tools: The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow, the ability to speak to the reader in silence.»

Les dem igjen