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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
Commit
Follow
Reader
Away
Writing
Overboard
Trying
Jump
Readers
Anywhere

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
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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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Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
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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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Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
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Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
William Zinsser
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Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.
William Zinsser
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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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Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does - in his own words. His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land.
William Zinsser
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Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.
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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
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Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
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.
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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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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
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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.
William Zinsser
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Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.
William Zinsser
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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
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The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
William Zinsser
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser