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The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
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
Secret
Writing
Every
Good
Cleanest
Strip
Components
Sentence
Sentences
More quotes by William Zinsser
If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
William Zinsser
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.
William Zinsser
Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
William Zinsser
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
Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
William Zinsser
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
William Zinsser
Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
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
Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy the choice is ours.
William Zinsser
The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
William Zinsser
I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
William Zinsser
Thought is action in rehearsal.
William Zinsser
The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
William Zinsser
Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.
William Zinsser
People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.
William Zinsser
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
William Zinsser
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
Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
William Zinsser
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
My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
William Zinsser
