5 ideas
A prose style should follow the rhythm, word order and directness of educated speech rather than an inherited, ornamented written register. When writing sounds like one person thinking aloud to another, the reader meets a mind instead of a performance, and that intimacy is what makes the essay possible as a form.
A newly coined or revived word feels strange because readers have not met it often, not because it is inherently ugly. The writer's job is to keep using it until it becomes familiar, since usage by writers, not dictionaries or decrees, is what settles a language. Rejecting a word as 'unnatural' on first contact mistakes unfamiliarity for a defect.
The critic should state plainly what he likes and dislikes and why it moved or bored him, instead of hiding behind objective-sounding rules. An honest subjective judgment gives the reader something real to argue with, while pretended impartiality conceals the taste that is actually doing the judging.
A young literary language grows by translating the classics of other traditions, because rendering foreign ideas forces it to develop the words and sentence structures it lacks. Translation is not a substitute for native writing but the training ground in which native writers acquire new means of expression.
In the newspaper pieces gathered here, Ataç did not just argue for a purified Turkish. He kept doing this even though readers found the prose odd and objected, which made his daily columns a public, running test of whether sustained usage can make new language feel normal.