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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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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
Person
Great
Different
Writing
Visualize
Trying
Mass
Every
Reader
Life
Audience
Persons
More quotes by William Zinsser
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
William Zinsser
Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
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Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.
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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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Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.
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All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
William Zinsser
Good writing is lean and confident.
William Zinsser
Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
William Zinsser
There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
William Zinsser
Writing is not a special language that belongs to a few sensitive souls who have a 'gift for words'. Writing is the logical arrangement of thought. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly---about any subject at all.
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People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
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As a writer I try to operate within a framework of Christian principles, and the words that are important to me are religious words: witness, pilgrimage, intention.
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Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
William Zinsser
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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Editors are licensed to be curious.
William Zinsser
Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
William Zinsser
