"Clutter is the disease of American writing. Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline pilot who wakes us to announce that he is presently experiencing considerable weather wouldn’t dream of saying that there’s a storm ahead and it may get bumpy. The sentence is too simple - there must be something wrong with it. But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Can such principles be taught? Maybe not. But most of them can be learned."

William Zinsser in On Writting Well (via patrickrhone)

(via mnmal)