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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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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
Direct
Keep
Writing
Things
Ratio
Improves
Ratios
Shouldn

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Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
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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.
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You learn to write by writing.
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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
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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.
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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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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
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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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There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
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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.
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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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Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
William Zinsser
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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
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Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
William Zinsser
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It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon launder became a dirty word.
William Zinsser
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Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
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