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?
Where one man reads the Bible, a hundred read you and me.
Feeling gratitude isn't born in us-it's something we are taught, and in turn, we teach our children.
Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in.
If you want to learn to swim jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.
He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception. It is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all former creeds and to proceed by means of the method in the search for truth.
As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book.
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