President Woodrow Wilson, on how to write sentences:

The best teacher I ever had used to say to me, “When you frame a sentence don’t do it as if you were loading a shotgun but as if you were loading a rifle. Don’t fire in such a way and with such a load that while you hit the thing you aim at, you will hit a lot of things in the neighborhood besides; but shoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone.”

The studious and correct use of language is an act of precision; it is the process of eliminating suplusage and embodying only those things which are of the substance of the statement itself. It is an attempt always to fire for the one thing.

In the use of language, we ought to be like the Boer in South Africa, who when he goes out intending to bring back one piece of game carries only one bullet.

As printed in the Educator-Journal, Vol. VIII, February 1908.