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All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.

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
Solving
Ultimately
Question
Problem
Writing

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It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon launder became a dirty word.
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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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Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
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Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.
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There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.
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Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
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One of the saddest sentences I know is I wish I had asked my mother about that. Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.
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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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Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
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Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
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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.
William Zinsser
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There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
William Zinsser
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A clear sentence is no accident.
William Zinsser
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Good writing is lean and confident.
William Zinsser
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Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
William Zinsser
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To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
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Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better.... Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.
William Zinsser
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Thought is action in rehearsal.
William Zinsser