Quote

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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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
Writer
Content
Pieces
Emotions
Rooms
Material
Emotion
Piece
Tenaciously
Bring
Materials
Crammed
Moving
Reader
Explaining
Given
Emotional
Resist
Must
Room
Readers

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Although the frankfurter originated in Frankfurt, Germany, we have long since made it our own, a twin pillar of democracy along with Mom's apple pie. In fact, now that Mom's apple pie comes frozen and baked by somebody who isn't Mom, the hot dog stands alone. What it symbolizes remains pure, even if what it contains does not.
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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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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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Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.
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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
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Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
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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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When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
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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.
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Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
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Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.
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A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.
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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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The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
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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.
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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.
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Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
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