Quote

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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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
Learned
Thereby
Taught
Contrast
Gone
Sentence
Start
Sentences
Word
Total
Change
Stronger
Primed
Many
Begin
Announces
Writing
Reader
Unlearn

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Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
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Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does - in his own words. His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land.
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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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Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
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Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.
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Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.
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The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
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All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
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You learn to write by writing.
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Be grateful for every word you can cut.
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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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Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
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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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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
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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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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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I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.
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Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better.... Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.
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Although the frankfurter originated in Frankfurt, Germany, we have long since made it our own, a twin pillar of democracy along with Mom's apple pie. In fact, now that Mom's apple pie comes frozen and baked by somebody who isn't Mom, the hot dog stands alone. What it symbolizes remains pure, even if what it contains does not.
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