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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.

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
Language
Like
Sludge
Purist
Scholarship
Fury
Faced
Hath

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Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated.
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All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.
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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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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.
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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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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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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.
William Zinsser
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You learn to write by writing.
William Zinsser
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Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
William Zinsser
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Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
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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.
William Zinsser
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I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
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Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.
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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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Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with but. If that's what you learned, unlearn it - there's no stronger word at the start. It announces a total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.
William Zinsser
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To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
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Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.
William Zinsser
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The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
William Zinsser
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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
William Zinsser