Written Language Quotes - Page 2

• Be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

  Henry Watson Fowler

  Writing, Simple, Editing

  Henry Watson Fowler, Francis George Fowler (1931). “The King's English”, Oxford University Press

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• Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

  Cato the Elder

  Communication, Self Improvement, Language

  Quoted in Caius Julius Victor, Ars Rhetorica

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• The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Writing, Cutting, Important

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• Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

  Matthew Arnold

  Writing, Secret, Famous Writers

  Quoted in G.W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections (1898)

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• He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.

  John Ray

  Writing, Use, Using Words

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• Every big company has some little guy who is an enthusiast off in the corner working on technology. In Japan, it is integrated into their high-level strategy. They see it as a communication medium, because for them, just the words  -  and this is the problem that they have with Americans  -  just the words they say to you is not the complete message. Their facial expressions, their body language, there is a lot of context. Also, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well.

  Howard Rheingold

  Communication, Technology, Japan

  Source: medium.com

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• This is the power of images, the ambiguity. You are never completely sure of anything. With written language, it's more concrete. You have to establish some facts, but in movies, you see things happening, and the exact meaning behind the images is more ambiguous.

  Albert Serra

  Facts, Language, Ambiguity

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.

  Charlton Laird

  Civilization, Generations, Succeed

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• Here is how you know someone has had a good idea: Other people freely admit to their friends that said idea has changed their lives. Most people today will grant that fire and the wheel are the big two. After that, any attempts to rank the greatest ideas of all time are going to draw lots of argument. You’ll have zealots pimping this god or that on the one hand, scientists pimping Darwin on the other, and then practical people pointing at written language and saying, look, fellas, the reason those ideas have gone viral is because someone figured out how to write them down.

  Kevin Hearne

  Writing, Fire, Hands

  Kevin Hearne (2014). “The Iron Druid Chronicles 6-Book Bundle: Hounded, Hexed, Hammered, Tricked, Trapped, Hunted”, p.643, Del Rey

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• I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.

  James Frey

  Writing, Voice, Trying

  Interview with Toby Litt, tobylitt.wordpress.com. August 1, 2008.

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• Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves.

  Edmund White

  Reflection, Men, Looks

  Edmund White (2014). “States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America”, p.284, University of Wisconsin Pres

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• The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

  John Muir

  Stars, Eye, Wind

  John Muir (2010). “The Wilderness Journeys”, Canongate Books

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• Taste and smell are often the beggars among our five senses - they leave no written language and therefore no standards other than wholly personal ones. Tasting a superlative Moselle wine can be an aesthetic experience no less genuine than hearing a Mozart piano concerto or seeing for the first time an original Breughel painting.

  Frank Schoonmaker

  Wine, Piano, Smell

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• The major accomplishment of analyzing illiteracy so far has been the listing of symptoms: the decrease in functional literacy; a general degradation of writing skills and reading comprehension; an alarming increase of packaged language (cliches used in speeches, canned messages); and a general tendency to substitute visual media (especially television and video) for written language.

  Mihai Nadin

  Reading, Writing, Media

  Mihai Nadin (1997). “The Civilization of Illiteracy”, p.17, Dresden University Press

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• When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

  Jamais Cascio

  Memories, Space, Radio

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• In Japan, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well. So they have problem communicating with computers, so they really feel that what's missing from telephones and computer interfaces is this ability to move around in three-space.

  Howard Rheingold

  Moving, Japan, Space

  Source: medium.com

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• One of the things I love about translation is it obliterates the self. When I'm trying to figure out what Tu Fu has to say, I have to kind of impersonate Tu Fu. I have to take on, if you will, his voice and his skin in English, and I have to try to get as deeply into the poem as possible. I'm not trying to make an equivalent poem in English, which can't be done because our language can't accommodate the kind of metaphors within metaphors the Chinese written language can, and often does, contain.

  Sam Hamill

  Voice, Self, Chinese

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• Literacy, written language is a very late acquisition in terms of human evolution.

  Jean Berko Gleason

  Acquisition, Evolution, Language

  "Unfolding Language, Unfolding Life". "On Being" with Krista Tippett, onbeing.org. November 3, 2011.

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• It is difficult to disturb the common usage of Korean that is bent to the perspective of a male-oriented society. Korean society is based on both a politics and history that have been disguised as a solid society of solid male poems, a solid written language, fixed rules of how to write literature, and a narrative language.

  Kim Hyesoon

  Writing, Perspective, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is
  innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk,
  talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends,
  even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or
  remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written
  language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and
  skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to
  have evolved.

  Steven Pinker

  Children, Reading, School

  "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature". Book by Steven Pinker, 2002.

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• Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Book, Reality, Psychics

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• Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Real, Character, Math

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• This is what happens when the discourse of publishing, defined and driven by spoken and written language, is talked about in exactly the same vocabulary and syntax as any widgetmaking industry. Books are reformulated as 'product' - like screwdrivers or flea-bombs or soap - and the majority of writers are perceived as typists with bad attitudes.

  Suzette Haden Elgin

  Attitude, Book, Vocabulary

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• In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

  Italo Calvino

  Running, Communication, Differences

  "Six Memos for the Next Millennium". Book by Italo Calvino. Translated by Patrick Creagh, 1996.

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• The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.

  Paulo Freire

  Attention, Body, Pay

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