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Clutter is the disease of American writing.

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
American
Writing
Frills
Strangling
Jargon
Pompous
Clutter
Disease

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Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
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Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.
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Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.
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I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
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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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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.
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The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
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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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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.
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Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.
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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.
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You learn to write by writing.
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To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
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It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon launder became a dirty word.
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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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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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Writing is thinking on paper.
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Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
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