Avoid Excess
One extraordinary part of good writing is to avoid excess, which many writers do not understand. The next thing, which of course is obvious, is to be aware of the music, the symphony of words, and to make written expression acceptable to the ear. How successfully and how one does that, I don’t know. But certainly it is something that has always been a concern of mine. I worked on it very hard in one of my first widely read books, The Great Crash of 1929, and I was enormously pleased when it was so reviewed. The Great Crash is an ambiguous title, I must say, one should always watch titles. I saw this many times. I looked once to see if a copy was in the LaGuardia Airport bookstore in New York and the lady there said, “That’s not a title you could sell in an airport.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, Conversations with History
[x]#2415 fan maandag 15 januari 2007 @ 08:50:13
Gelkinghe op 15 januari 2007 @ 21:45:20
Dat er onder een tekst een muzikale laag zit, daar ben ik me altijd zeer bewust van. Die opmerking van Galbraith is me dan ook uit het hart gegrepen.