Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you you have omitted every word that he can spare.
Interpretation
Writing should be so engaging that the reader feels compelled to read every word.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of clarity and relevance in writing. It suggests that good writing is marked by its ability to engage readers, making them unable to skip any part because every line is thoughtfully crafted and indispensable to the overall message.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to convince participants to focus on clarity, I might cite Emerson's quote.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Knowledge people and service people learn the most when they teach .
I like to read things I've read before. It's like listening over and over to your favorite song.
I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money. If you're in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS.
When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it's not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns.
If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.
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