Quote

Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

William Zinsser

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
William Zinsser
Image
Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
William Zinsser
Image
A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
Image
Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
Image
Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
William Zinsser
Image
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
Image
The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.
William Zinsser
Image
Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
William Zinsser
Image
Every time you look at a blank piece of paper, you're doing something new. You have to step onto that blank territory and remind yourself the sky didn't fall in the last time you wrote. Writing is a question of overcoming your fears-and everybody has them.
William Zinsser
Image
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do
William Zinsser
Image
To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
William Zinsser
Image
If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.
William Zinsser