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Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

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
Poor
Translator
Moving
Translators
Even
Moves
Clarity
Narrative
Kill
Couldn
Style

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
William Zinsser
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Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.
William Zinsser
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The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
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Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
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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.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
William Zinsser
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The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
William Zinsser
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Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.
William Zinsser
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
William Zinsser
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To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
William Zinsser
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You learn to write by writing.
William Zinsser
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
William Zinsser