[Phil Yearout]

In Bill's article "Invisible Writing", Bill related that he once had his dad, "Tap" Tapply (a pretty darn good writer in his own right) critique a piece of his writing. It came back to him with a lot of red marks. According to Bill, this is what his dad told him:

“Don’t try to impress your reader with how cleverly you write. These fancy words, all these adjectives and adverbs and vocabulary words”—he pronounced the word vocabulary as if it meant “disgusting human waste product”—“all they do is call attention to you. You don’t want your reader aware of your writing at all. If you do your job, you’ll have them thinking about your ideas, your arguments, your characters, or whatever it is you’re trying to communicate. If someone tells you, ‘Wow, that’s great writing,’ you know you’ve failed.”