Say it right

摘要

In his 1909 book Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, the American author and satirist Ambrose Bierce advises that for good writing precision is the 'point of capital concern', achieved by the right choice of word 'that accurately and adequately expresses what the writer has in mind, and by exclusion of that which either denotes or connotes something else.' He goes on to quote Roman scholar Quintilian: a writer should write so that his reader not only may, but must, understand.