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Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.
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
Make
Subjects
Think
Thoughts
Thinking
Whatever
Learn
Clarifies
Find
Organizes
Writing
Enables
Trying
Organize
Way
Subject
More quotes by William Zinsser
If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.
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Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
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Writing is hard work.
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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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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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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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Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
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If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
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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.
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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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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.
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The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
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Writing is thinking on paper.
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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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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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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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Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
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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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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.
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