Believe Quote by Kory Stamper

Back in the 19th century, our marketing folks decided to play up the refined usage angle because prescriptivism was very popular: our dictionary is…

— Kory Stamper

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and…

— John H. McWhorter

As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.

— John McWhorter

… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…

— Derek Walcott

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of…

— Jose Saramago

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of…

— Alice McDermott

When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The…

— Steven Pinker

The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off…

— Brenda Ueland

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

— James Payn

This is what happens when the discourse of publishing, defined and driven by spoken and written language, is talked about in exactly the same…

— Suzette Haden Elgin

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer…

— Daniel Kahneman

I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively ... For words are merely…

— Hunter S. Thompson