Quote, unqote: Write as you'd talk to a best friend

“The only thing I tried to instill was, when I first got there, I found that the writing style was pretty insular, and that they were trying to impress people with how smart and hipper-than-thou they were. I tried to tell them to write as if you’re talking to your best friend from college. And that’s what happened.”

-- Jim Seymore, former managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, quoted in a story in the New York Observer about setting the tone for EW, which resulted in a couple of dozen of its writers writing books.