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If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.

William Zinsser

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William Zinsser
Age: 92 †
Born: 1922
Born: October 7
Died: 2015
Died: May 12
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New York City
New York
William Knowlton Zinsser
People
Hardest
Perfection
Seems
Hard
Writing
Things

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.
William Zinsser
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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
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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
William Zinsser
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Every time you look at a blank piece of paper, you're doing something new. You have to step onto that blank territory and remind yourself the sky didn't fall in the last time you wrote. Writing is a question of overcoming your fears-and everybody has them.
William Zinsser
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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
William Zinsser
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The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
William Zinsser
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But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.
William Zinsser
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
William Zinsser
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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
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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
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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
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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
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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
William Zinsser
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
William Zinsser
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Be grateful for every word you can cut.
William Zinsser
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You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?
William Zinsser
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
William Zinsser
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
William Zinsser
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Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
William Zinsser
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Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
William Zinsser