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The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.

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
Numbers
Words
Learn
Force
Regular
Write
Basis
Certain
Bases
Writing
Number
Way
Produce

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.
William Zinsser
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Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.
William Zinsser
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The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
William Zinsser
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Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
William Zinsser
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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?
William Zinsser
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Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
William Zinsser
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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
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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
William Zinsser
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Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.
William Zinsser
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
William Zinsser
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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
William Zinsser