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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
Sludge
Purist
Scholarship
Fury
Faced
Hath
Language
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More quotes by William Zinsser

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Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do
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Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
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Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
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There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.
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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
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Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
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If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
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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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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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A clear sentence is no accident.
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Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.
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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
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The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
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I try to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that's not doing useful work. Then I go over it once more, reading it aloud, and am always amazed at how much clutter can still be cut.
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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.
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
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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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.
William Zinsser