William Zinsser - Writing Quotes

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Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does — in his own words. His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land.

William Zinsser
Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.

William Zinsser
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.

William Zinsser
A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.

William Zinsser
You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into an entertainment. Usually this means giving the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of devices will do the job.... These seeming amusements in fact become your 'style.' When we say we like the style of certain writers, what we mean is that we like their personality as they express it on paper.

William Zinsser
The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.

William Zinsser
Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.

William Zinsser
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

William Zinsser
This is a book by a writer who does some teaching, not a book by a teacher who does some writing, and one of the satisfactions of the craft is that there's always something new to learn.

William Zinsser
My commodity as a writer, whatever I'm writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don't alter your voice to fit your subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognise when they hear it on the page.

William Zinsser
Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.

William Zinsser
Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.

William Zinsser
Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.

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
Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

William Zinsser
Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.

William Zinsser
Writing is thinking on paper, or talking to someone on paper. If you can think clearly, or if you can talk to someone about the things you know and care about, you can write - with confidence and enjoyment.

William Zinsser
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author.

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
A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.

William Zinsser
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.

William Zinsser
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

William Zinsser
Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept. We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't.

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
Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual—it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.

William Zinsser
Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.

William Zinsser
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.

William Zinsser
You learn to write by writing. It's a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it's true. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain amount of words on a regular basis.

William Zinsser
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.

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

William Zinsser