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Be grateful for every word you can cut.

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
Writing
Every
Grateful
Cutting
Word

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Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
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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.
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Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.
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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.
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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.
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If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
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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.
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Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
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Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
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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.
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Clutter is the disease of American writing.
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
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Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy the choice is ours.
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It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon launder became a dirty word.
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