William Zinsser Quotes

what we want to do we will do well.

Remember that words are the only tools you’ve got. Learn to use them with originality and care. And also remember: somebody out there is listening.

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

Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves,

We write to find out what we know and what we want to say.

"Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous" (many), "facilitate" (ease), "Individual" (man or woman), "remainder" (rest), "initial" (first), "implement" (do), "sufficient" (enough), "attempt" (try), "referred to as" (called), and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write. Don't dialogue with someone you can talk to. Don't interface with anybody."

Probably no subject is too hard if people take the trouble to think and write and read clearly.

I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document — a letter, for instance — had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.

Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.

I like Catch-22, Gravity’s Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels — Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig — invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn’t do the job they had in mind.

The information will only be helpful if readers can grasp it quickly and easily. If it’s muddy they will get discouraged or angry, or both, and will stop reading. You can avoid this dreaded fate for your message, whatever it is, by making sure that every sentence is a logical sequel to the one that preceded it.

Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.

Yet very few people realize how badly they write and how badly this hurts them and their career and their company. People are judged on the basis of who they appear to be in their writing, and if what they write is pompous or fuzzy or disorganized they will be perceived as all those things. Bad writing makes bright people look dumb.

Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Orwell’s version goes: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Nonfiction writing should always have a point: It should leave the reader with a set of facts, or an idea, or a point of view, that he didn’t have before he started reading. Writers may write for any number of good personal reasons — ego, therapy, recollection, validation of their lives. But what they produce will have a validity of its own to the extent that it’s useful to somebody else.