William Zinsser - Sentence Quotes

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Writing is the handmaiden of leadership. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.

William Zinsser
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead.

William Zinsser
We have all suffered more than our share of these sentences in which an exclamation point knocks us over the head with how cute or wonderful something was.

William Zinsser
One of the saddest sentences I know is "I wish I had asked my mother about that." Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.

William Zinsser
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do.

William Zinsser
All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative—good old-fashioned storytelling—is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.

William Zinsser
Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.

William Zinsser
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb...these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.

William Zinsser
God turns up occasionally as a governing presence, and my sentences take some of their cadences and allusions from the King James Bible. But there's no mention of religious worship or religious belief — the residue of all those Sunday mornings spent in Protestant churches singing the hymns, reciting the Psalms and listening to the Word.

William Zinsser
Not being a writer, my father never worried about finding his "style." He just wrote the way he talked, and now, when I read his sentences, I hear his personality and his humor, his idioms and his usages, many of them an echo of his college years in the early 1900s. I also hear his honesty.

William Zinsser
There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.

William Zinsser
Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with " but." If that's what you learned, unlearn it — there's no stronger word at the start. It announces a total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.

William Zinsser