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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
Grateful
Cutting
Word
Writing
Every

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There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
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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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Good writing is lean and confident.
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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
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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?
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Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
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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.
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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.
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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
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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.
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Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
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Clutter is the disease of American writing.
William Zinsser
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
William Zinsser
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The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
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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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Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
William Zinsser
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My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
William Zinsser