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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.

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
Writers
Adjectives
Longer
Sleepy
Elms
Pretty
Unconsciously
Lagoons
Almost
Kitten
Stately
Become
Prose
Boughs
Make
Fill
Kittens
Soil
Lush
Sentences
Graceful

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
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Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.
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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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Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
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Thought is action in rehearsal.
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But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.
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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
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Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
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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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The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
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All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
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People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
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I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.
William Zinsser
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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
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Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have emotional equity in our first draft we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't.
William Zinsser
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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
William Zinsser
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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
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The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
William Zinsser