"To write English well, it is generally agreed, is not to imitate, but to evolve a style peculiarly suited to one's own temperament, environment and purposes."
"No writer should fail to reckon with modern reading habits."
"It is not that modern people are less intelligent than their grandparents: only that, being busier, they are less careful."
"Imaginative readers rewrite books to suit their own taste, omitting and mentally altering as they read."
"We do not suggest that writers should indulge busy readers by writing down to them--giving them nothing but short messages simply phrased; but only that sentences and paragraphs should follow one another so easily and inevitably, and with such economy of phrase, that a reader will have no encouragement to skip."
-Robert Graves & Alan Hodge in The Reader Over Your Shoulder
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