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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.

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
Learning
Process
Writing
Thinking

More quotes by William Zinsser

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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
William Zinsser
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
William Zinsser
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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
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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
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Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
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The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
William Zinsser
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All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.
William Zinsser
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I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.
William Zinsser
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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
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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
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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
William Zinsser
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Finding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn't much help-taste is a quality so intangible that it can't even be defined. But we know it when we meet it.
William Zinsser
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Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
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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Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.
William Zinsser
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There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
William Zinsser
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Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
William Zinsser
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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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Writing is thinking on paper.
William Zinsser
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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