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People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.

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
Read
People
Ears
Whether

More quotes by 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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A clear sentence is no accident.
William Zinsser
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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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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Writing is a craft not an art.
William Zinsser
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Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
William Zinsser
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Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.
William Zinsser
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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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
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
William Zinsser
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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
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Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.
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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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
William Zinsser
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Clutter is the disease of American writing.
William Zinsser
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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
William Zinsser
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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
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Good writing is lean and confident.
William Zinsser