Leaving Berkeley for New York after college, Joan Didion took a job writing captions at the fashion journal. Maria Popova quotes her about the routine there: "At Vogue one learned fast, or one did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters. We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs."
