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Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.

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
Crafts
Principles
Forget
Certain
Never
Practicing
Craft

More quotes by William Zinsser

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I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
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I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
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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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Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
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Good writing is lean and confident.
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Thought is action in rehearsal.
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It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon launder became a dirty word.
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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
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Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
William Zinsser
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Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
William Zinsser
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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
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Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.
William Zinsser
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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
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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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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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.
William Zinsser
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Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
William Zinsser
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Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
William Zinsser
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Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.
William Zinsser
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Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
William Zinsser