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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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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
Needs
Reader
Writing
Problems
Every
Stop
Asks
Next
Doe
Sentence
Problem
Sentences
Need
Solve
More quotes by William Zinsser
Writing is thinking on paper.
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If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
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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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A writer is always working.
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Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
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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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Editors are licensed to be curious.
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Finding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn't much help-taste is a quality so intangible that it can't even be defined. But we know it when we meet it.
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
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If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.
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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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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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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.
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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
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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 say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
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Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
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Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
William Zinsser
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
William Zinsser
