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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.

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
Together
Eye
Bears
May
Sound
Reader
Mind
Read
Realize
Fact
Seem
Stringing
Words
Realizing
Choosing
Facts
Hear
Readers
Also
Eyes
Absurd
Seems
Reading
Bear

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
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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.
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Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.
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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
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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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Be grateful for every word you can cut.
William Zinsser
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Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
William Zinsser
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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.
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Writing is no respecter of blueprints.
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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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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
William Zinsser
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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.
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The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
William Zinsser
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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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Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
William Zinsser
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My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
William Zinsser
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What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.
William Zinsser
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
William Zinsser
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All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
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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