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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
Great
Different
Writing
Visualize
Trying
Mass
Every
Reader
Life
Audience
Persons
Person
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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
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Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
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The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
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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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Good writing is lean and confident.
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You learn to write by writing.
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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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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
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I try to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that's not doing useful work. Then I go over it once more, reading it aloud, and am always amazed at how much clutter can still be cut.
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When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
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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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Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.
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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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Writing is a craft not an art.
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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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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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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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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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A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
