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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.

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
Clutter
Unnecessary
Construction
Frills
Meaningless
Constructions
Disease
Strangling
Society
Circular
American
Jargon
Words
Pompous

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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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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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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
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Clutter is the disease of American writing.
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Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.
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Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.
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Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
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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.
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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.
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Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
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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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Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
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What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.
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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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Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
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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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But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.
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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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