Acquaintance Quote by Herbert Spencer

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.

— Richard Whately

Composition is for the most part an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution,…

— Samuel Johnson

To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons;…

— Samuel Johnson

Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken.…

— Henry David Thoreau

Concerning the utility of Rhetoric, it is to be observed that it divides itself into two; first, whether Oratorical skill be, on the whole,…

— Richard Whately

“Any one may mouth out a passage with theatrical cadence or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts. But to write or speak with…

— William Hazlitt

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing…

— Aristotle

“It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually…

— William Strunk Jr

One of the principals of composition, I would say, in fiction, is you want to do what you can do a lot of. You…

— George Saunders

Read your own compositions,and when you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

— Anonymous

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

— Henry David Thoreau

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

— Samuel Johnson