William Zinsser - On Writing Well (1976)

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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
Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.

William Zinsser
The Semicolon. There is a 19th-century mustiness that hangs over the semicolon.... The semicolon brings the reader, if not to a halt, at least to a pause. So use it with discretion, remembering that it will slow to a Victorian pace the late-20th-century momentum you're striving for, and rely instead on the period and the dash.

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
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.

William Zinsser
Don't try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

William Zinsser
Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new.

William Zinsser
People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.

William Zinsser
When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.

William Zinsser
We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

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
The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.

William Zinsser
The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.

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
Pure nonsense is a joy forever, as Keats didn't quite say. I love to see a writer flying high, just for the hell of it.

William Zinsser
To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

William Zinsser
Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated.

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
Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.

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
Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read." He went on to caution: "But don't go berserk. A succession of tiny paragraphs is as annoying as a paragraph that's too long.

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
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
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
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
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.

William Zinsser
If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.

William Zinsser
But ultimately eloquence runs on a deeper current. It moves us with what it leaves unsaid, touching off echoes in what we already know from our reading, our religion and our heritage...It was no accident that Lincoln's speeches resounded with echoes of the King James Bible; he knew it almost by heart from his boyhood.

William Zinsser
There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.

William Zinsser