William Zinsser - On Writing Well (1976)

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Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five — just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.

William Zinsser
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.

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

William Zinsser
Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.

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
Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind. New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech.

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
It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon "launder" became a dirty word.

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

William Zinsser
Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.

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

William Zinsser
Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.

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
Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.

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
The Dash. Somehow this invaluable tool is widely regarded as not quite proper — a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English. But it has full membership and will get you out of many tight corners.

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
Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.

William Zinsser
Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

William Zinsser
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
Good criticism needs a lean and vivid style to express what you observed and what you think. Florid adjectives smack of the panting prose with which Vogue likes to disclose its latest chichi discovery: 'We've just heard about the most utterly enchanting little beach at Cozumel.'

William Zinsser
Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.

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