Top 59 Grammar Writing Quotes
#1. I had really good English teachers in elementary through high school. Not only were we required to read a lot - which is the best training for writing - we were drilled on grammar every day, every night. I hated the drill part, but I don't dangle my participles too often.
Carol Berg
#2. A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.
Edgar Allan Poe
#3. Yes I am aware of the rules.
Yes I can totally see how I err the Queen.
Yes it is this very fact of slaying her language.
That gives my soul its melodies.
Malebo Sephodi
#5. Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.
Laura Kreitzer
#6. I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:
The past, present, and future walk into a bar - it was tense.
Kelli Russell Agodon
#7. All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind - the culture - has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.
Annie Dillard
#8. The wall between writing and painting is just good grammar.
Moderation in moderation.
Fun is scary with a happy ending.
Just love. If love doesn't transform that which annoys you, it will be easier to tolerate.
Emily Thornton Calvo
#9. A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.
Baltasar Gracian
#10. 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 distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.
John McWhorter
#11. The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.
Val Kovalin
#12. Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.
Jonathan Sacks
#13. Try - Takes the infinitive: "try to mend it," not "try and mend it." Students of the language will argue that 'try and' has won through and become idiom. Indeed it has, and it is relaxed and acceptable. But 'try to' is precise, and when you are writing formal prose, try and write 'try to.
William Strunk Jr.
#15. Whether the vessel is a legal document or a rap song, language is often chosen ot exclude. To use a scholarly phrase, "discourse communities" are often gated,so it's the good writer's job to offer readers a set of keys.
Roy Peter Clark
#16. Grammar to a writer is to a mountaineer a good pair of hiking boots or, more precisely, to a deep-sea diver an oxygen tank.
A.A. Patawaran
#17. Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.
Terry Pratchett
#18. Grammar perfect books are for Ivy Leaguers in Ivory Towers. My book is a sandcastle built on the beach of usefullness.
Jonathan Heatt
#19. George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.
Oscar Wilde
#20. A good writer knew when not to write. Anybody could type. Not that I was a good typist; also I couldn't spell and I didn't know grammar. But I knew when not to write. It was like fucking. You had to rest the godhead now and then.
Charles Bukowski
#21. To conform within rational limits to a given style is no more servile than to pay one's taxes or to write according to the rule of grammar.
Elsie De Wolfe
#22. Reading and writing, arithmetic and grammar do not constitute education, any more than a knife, fork and spoon constitute a dinner.
John Lubbock
#23. Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.
Muriel Barbery
#24. Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#25. You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within.
Robert J. Randisi
#26. Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.
John Fowles
#27. The process of editing a piece of writing seems sometimes a lot like natural selection. Your efforts never really eliminate the mistakes. You just cause them to evolve into a sneakier, more robust breed.
John A. Ashley
#28. In my imagination, the Editor meditated in a mountain-cave, espoused the rules of grammar, and frowned upon speculative fiction.
Josh Malerman
#29. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.
Dorothy Parker
#31. He who writes must master the rules of grammar. He who shoots photographs needs only to follow the instructions as given by the camera ... This leads to the paradox that the more people shoot photographs, the less they are capable of deciphering them.
Vilem Flusser
#32. the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive
Stanley Fish
#33. Grammar is ... the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.
Stephen King
#34. Grammar is to a writer what anatomy is to a sculptor, or the scales to a musician. You may loathe it, it may bore you, but nothing will replace it, and once mastered it will support you like a rock.
B. J. Chute
#35. What is competent writing? Competent writing is writing that efficiently describes ideas and concepts to an audience, using a grammar that the audience can understand.
John Scalzi
#36. A barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name ... One of our tribe of great men who turn disease to commodity ... he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory.
John Quincy Adams
#37. When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.
King Samuel Benson
#38. Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.
Beryl Bainbridge
#39. I spent the rest of the workday on routine paperwork, snarling at misplaced files and seething at the stupidity of everyone else's report writing
when did Grammar die?
Jeff Lindsay
#40. When it comes to the college essay, feel free to break some rules. Many still apply, of course: you need to watch your grammar and spell everything correctly. Sentence structure still matters. But the formula that got you A's in English can be a straitjacket when you're writing your college essay.
Cassie Nichols
#41. If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.
Arthur Plotnik
#42. As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars." "And what are they?" "A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.
Jane Austen
#43. Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E.B. White
#44. As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in relation to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why skill in both reading and writing is gained through these arts.
Mortimer J. Adler
#45. You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better.
Courage Knight
#46. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.
Samuel Colbran
#47. To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#48. good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments.
Stephen King
#49. Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.
Mark Twain
#50. A writer who can't write in a grammerly manner better shut up shop.
Artemas Ward
#51. My first interest in graffitti came when I was in grammar school, around '87 or '88 I was about twelve years old. I did not know much about writing, I just knew that I liked to write my name everywhere I could in my neighborhood.
KAWS
#52. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose.
C.S. Lewis
#53. Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Red Red Rover
#54. Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to ... But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.
Thomas Jefferson
#55. I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.
Mark Twain
#56. In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.
Will Schwalbe
#57. Perfect grammar
persistent, continuous, sustained
is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.
Mark Twain
#58. Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears ...
Jack Kerouac
#59. Reading and writing don't inevitably go together. You can read without learning a thing about writing, grammar, or spelling, although, you certainly can't learn anything about writing, grammar, or spelling unless you read.
Frank Smith
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