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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.

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
Weed
Behinds
Behind
Writer
Fighting
Always
Weeds
Like
Clutter
Slightly

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My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
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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.
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Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
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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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Writing is hard work.
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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
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Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
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I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
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Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five - just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.
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All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
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Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better.... Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.
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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.
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One of the saddest sentences I know is I wish I had asked my mother about that. Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.
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Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.
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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.
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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