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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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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
Writing
Overboard
Trying
Jump
Readers
Anywhere
Commit
Follow
Reader
Away
More quotes by William Zinsser
Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
William Zinsser
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
The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
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Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
William Zinsser
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
William Zinsser
Thought is action in rehearsal.
William Zinsser
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
William Zinsser
Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
William Zinsser
No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief
William Zinsser
People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
William Zinsser
Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
William Zinsser
A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
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.
William Zinsser
A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
William Zinsser
Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
William Zinsser
Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
William Zinsser
Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
William Zinsser
The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
William Zinsser
Good writing is lean and confident.
William Zinsser
