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Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.

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
People
Excess
Realize
Nobody
Style
Realizing
Murkiness
Write
Crept
Writing
Shown
Much
Badly

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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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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.
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Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does - in his own words. His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land.
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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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There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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Editors are licensed to be curious.
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Clutter is the disease of American writing.
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Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
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Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.
William Zinsser
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Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.
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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.
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
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My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
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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
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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I try to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that's not doing useful work. Then I go over it once more, reading it aloud, and am always amazed at how much clutter can still be cut.
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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
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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
William Zinsser