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If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
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
Lose
Loses
Back
Dullards
Belong
Anyway
Dust
More quotes by William Zinsser
Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
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
Writing is a craft not an art.
William Zinsser
Writing is not a special language that belongs to a few sensitive souls who have a 'gift for words'. Writing is the logical arrangement of thought. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly---about any subject at all.
William Zinsser
Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
William Zinsser
Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
William Zinsser
Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.
William Zinsser
A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
William Zinsser
Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
William Zinsser
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
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
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
The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
William Zinsser
Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
William Zinsser
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do
William Zinsser
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead.
William Zinsser
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
William Zinsser
Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.
William Zinsser
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.
William Zinsser
