Quote

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
Verbs
Nails
Collapse
Sentences
Apart
Weak
Fall
Rickety
House
Syntax

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Thought is action in rehearsal.
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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.
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Be grateful for every word you can cut.
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Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
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I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
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Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
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Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
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Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
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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.
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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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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.
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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 is hard work.
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Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
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Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
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Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.
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There's no subject you don't have permission to write about. Students often avoid subjects close to their heart ... because they assume that their teachers will regard those topics as 'stupid.' No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.
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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.
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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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