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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
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
Visuals
Visual
Catch
Short
Brain
Chance
Paragraphs
Eye
Catches
Keep
Paragraph
More quotes by William Zinsser
I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
William Zinsser
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.
William Zinsser
Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
William Zinsser
Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
William Zinsser
Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
William Zinsser
Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.
William Zinsser
Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
William Zinsser
Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
William Zinsser
Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
William Zinsser
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.
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
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
William Zinsser
When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
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
Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
William Zinsser
Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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Be grateful for every word you can cut.
William Zinsser
If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
William Zinsser
A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.
William Zinsser
People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
William Zinsser
