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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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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
Subjects
Writer
Written
Sell
Sells
Ultimately
Product
Subject
Products
More quotes by William Zinsser
People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.
William Zinsser
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
William Zinsser
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
Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
William Zinsser
Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.
William Zinsser
The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
William Zinsser
Writing is hard work.
William Zinsser
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead.
William Zinsser
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
Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
William Zinsser
Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.
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.
William Zinsser
Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.
William Zinsser
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
William Zinsser
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
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.
William Zinsser
There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
William Zinsser
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
William Zinsser
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
William Zinsser
