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If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.

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
Nails
Collapse
Sentences
Apart
Weak
Fall
Rickety
House
Syntax
Verbs

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Clutter is the disease of American writing.
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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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I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
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Thought is action in rehearsal.
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
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Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
William Zinsser
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Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.
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My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
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If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
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A clear sentence is no accident.
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The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
William Zinsser
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
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Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.
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To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
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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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
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Although the frankfurter originated in Frankfurt, Germany, we have long since made it our own, a twin pillar of democracy along with Mom's apple pie. In fact, now that Mom's apple pie comes frozen and baked by somebody who isn't Mom, the hot dog stands alone. What it symbolizes remains pure, even if what it contains does not.
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A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
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Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to personalize the author.
William Zinsser