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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
Apart
Weak
Fall
Rickety
House
Syntax
Verbs
Nails
Collapse
Sentences

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Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
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No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief
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Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better.... Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.
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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
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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.
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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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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
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People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
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Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
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A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.
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Writing is thinking on paper.
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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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I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.
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