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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
Need
Solve
Needs
Reader
Writing
Problems
Every
Stop
Asks
Next
Doe
Sentence
Problem
Sentences

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The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
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Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
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Be grateful for every word you can cut.
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Writing is thinking on paper.
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Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
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Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to personalize the author.
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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 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.
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There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
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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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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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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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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
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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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Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
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