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Good writing is lean and confident.

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
Lean
Confident
Writing
Good

More quotes by William Zinsser

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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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Editors are licensed to be curious.
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Writing is hard work.
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
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Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
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Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new.
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Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.
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Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
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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.
William Zinsser
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
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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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Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
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Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have emotional equity in our first draft we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't.
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Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
William Zinsser
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No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief
William Zinsser
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To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
William Zinsser
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
William Zinsser
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Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five - just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.
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