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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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
Shapes
Unwieldy
Materials
Underestimated
Mass
Nonfiction
Writing
Impose
Narrative
Shape
Tasks
Material
More quotes by William Zinsser
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
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
Writing is linear and sequential Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing it's the thinking. 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
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
William Zinsser
There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
William Zinsser
Every time you look at a blank piece of paper, you're doing something new. You have to step onto that blank territory and remind yourself the sky didn't fall in the last time you wrote. Writing is a question of overcoming your fears-and everybody has them.
William Zinsser
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.
William Zinsser
It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon launder became a dirty word.
William Zinsser
Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
William Zinsser
What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.
William Zinsser
Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
William Zinsser
Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
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
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
Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with but. If that's what you learned, unlearn it - there's no stronger word at the start. It announces a total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.
William Zinsser
Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
William Zinsser
Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
William Zinsser
But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.
William Zinsser