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Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated.
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
Art
Crafts
Another
Eventually
Persons
Skin
Person
Skins
Imitated
Find
Models
Hesitate
Needs
Writer
Imitate
Every
Learning
Craft
Never
Voice
Shed
More quotes by William Zinsser
The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
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
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
Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.
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
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
William Zinsser
The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.
William Zinsser
Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with but. If that's what you learned, unlearn it - there's no stronger word at the start. It announces a total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.
William Zinsser
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
William Zinsser
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
William Zinsser
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
William Zinsser
A clear sentence is no accident.
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 no respecter of blueprints.
William Zinsser
Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
William Zinsser
Editors are licensed to be curious.
William Zinsser
Memoir isn't the summary of a life it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not it's a deliberate construction.
William Zinsser
Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.
William Zinsser
I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
William Zinsser
Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
William Zinsser
