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

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
Reading
Easy
Makes
Hard
Writing

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.
William Zinsser
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Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
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People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
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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.
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A writer is always working.
William Zinsser
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Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
William Zinsser
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Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
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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Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.
William Zinsser
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A clear sentence is no accident.
William Zinsser
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I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
William Zinsser
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Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.
William Zinsser
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Writing is thinking on paper.
William Zinsser
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All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
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You learn to write by writing.
William Zinsser
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Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.
William Zinsser
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The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
William Zinsser
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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