William Zinsser Quotes

the self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write.

rewriting is the essence of writing.

How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other. It's impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. He may get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will be lost, and there's no sin so grave, for the reader will not easily be lured back.

No kind of writing lodges itself so deeply in our memory, echoing there for the rest of our lives, as the books that we met in our childhood.

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.

Not every oak has to be gnarled.

I mention this to give confidence to all non-fiction writers: a point of craft. If you master the tools of the trade — the fundamentals of interviewing and of orderly construction — and if you bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your humanity, you can write about any subject. That's your ticket to an interesting life.

I don’t know what still newer marvels will make writing twice as easy in the next 30 years. But I do know they won’t make writing twice as good. That will still require plain old hard thinking — what E. B. White was doing in his boathouse — and the plain old tools of the English language.

"Writing can be taught or learned in the vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: "This is a how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.

Writing, however, isn’t a special language that belongs to English teachers and a few other sensitive souls who have a “gift for words.” Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly — about any subject at all.

What a good editor brings to a piece of writing is an objective eye that the writer has long since lost, and there is no end of ways in which an editor can improve a manuscript: pruning, shaping, clarifying, tidying a hundred inconsistencies of tense and pronoun and location and tone, noticing all the sentences that could be read in two different ways, dividing awkward long sentences into short ones, putting the writer back on the main road if he has strayed down a side path, building bridges where the writer has lost the reader by not paying attention to his transitions, questioning matters of judgment and taste. An editor’s hand must also be invisible. Whatever he adds in his own words shouldn’t sound like his own words; they should sound like the writer’s words.

all” is what we don’t want to hear. We only want to hear some. What made his trip different from everybody else’s? What can he tell us that we don’t already know? We don’t want him to describe every ride at Disneyland, or tell us that the Grand Canyon is awesome, or that Venice has canals. If one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, if somebody fell into the awesome Grand Canyon, that would be worth hearing about.

The value of a baccalaureate education for nurses today,” said Professor Miller, “is that it helps them to become leaders and decision-makers and advocates. The caring role is critical, and often nurses are the only people in a community who are in a position to see what’s happening to a family when something goes wrong — for instance, when the child of two working parents gets sick — and to find a solution.

Beyond that, I confirmed what I had always believed about my craft — that there’s no subject that can’t be made accessible in good English with careful writing and editing.

Shut up, he explained,