On Writing Well

The Book in 3 Sentences

Write simply and concisely to write well.

Write about what excites and interests you, and forget about impressing others.

Your greatest writing asset is yourself: people connect to your connection to a subject, not the subject itself.

Impressions:

This book is really exciting to read because Zinsser tells you exactly how to write well, while doing it throughout the book. By the end, as you read his sentences that at first seemed effortless, you see the hours of work that went into each paragraph.

My Top 3 Quotes:

Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and your readers will jump overboard to get away. Your product is you.

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.

Clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

Who Should Read it?

If you are serious at all about wanting to write better, or if you want to watch William Zinnser repeatedly dunk on the English language.

How the Book Changed me

I write slightly better now, but more importantly know what the path looks like to keep improving my writing.

Other Great Quotes

The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.

As for what point you want to make, every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have before.

Short is better than long. Of the 701 words in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, a marvel of economy in itself, 505 are words of one syllable and 122 are words of two syllables.

Look for small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you still remember them it’s because they contain a universal truth that your readers will recognize from their own life.

My Ideas from the Book

Notes

All Quotes

On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction, William Zinsser

You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience.

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.

The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.

Therefore ask yourself some basic questions before you start. For example: “In what capacity am I going to address the reader?” (Reporter? Provider of information? Average man or woman?) “What pronoun and tense am I going to use?” “What style?” (Impersonal reportorial? Personal but formal? Personal and casual?) “What attitude am I going to take toward the material?” (Involved? Detached? Judgmental? Ironic? Amused?) “How much do I want to cover?” “What one point do I want to make?”

As for what point you want to make, every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have before.

Don’t become the prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints.

The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third sentence, it’s equally dead. Of such a progression of sentences, each tugging the reader forward until he is hooked, a writer constructs that fateful unit, the “lead.”

One moral of this story is that you should always collect more material than you will use. Every article is strong in proportion to the surplus of details from which you can choose the few that will serve you best—if you don’t go on gathering facts forever. At some point you must stop researching and start writing. Another moral is to look for your material everywhere,

Another approach is to just tell a story. It’s such a simple solution, so obvious and unsophisticated, that we often forget that it’s available to us. But narrative is the oldest and most compelling method of holding someone’s attention; everybody wants to be told a story. Always look for ways to convey your information in narrative form.

Like the minister’s sermon that builds to a series of perfect conclusions that never conclude, an article that doesn’t stop where it should stop becomes a drag and therefore a failure.

For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.

Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around using a passive verb. The difference between an active verb style and a passive-verb style—in clarity and vigor—is the difference between life and death for a writer.

Short is better than long. Of the 701 words in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, a marvel of economy in itself, 505 are words of one syllable and 122 are words of two syllables.

Most adverbs are unnecessary. You will clutter your sentence and annoy the reader if you choose a verb that has a specific meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning.

Again, the rule is simple: make your adjectives do work that needs to be done. “He looked at the gray sky and the black clouds and decided to sail back to the harbor.” The darkness of the sky and the clouds is the reason for the decision. If it’s important to tell the reader that a house was drab or a girl was beautiful, by all means use “drab” and “beautiful.” They will have their proper power because you have learned to use adjectives sparsely.

Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: “a bit,” “a little,” “sort of,” “kind of,” “rather,” “quite,” “very,” “too,” “pretty much,” “in a sense” and dozens more. They dilute your style and your persuasiveness.

The dash is used in two ways. One is to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you stated in the first part. “We decided to keep going—it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner.” By its very shape the dash pushes the sentence ahead and explains why they decided to keep going. The other use involves two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence. “She told me to get in the car—she had been after me all summer to have a haircut—and we drove silently into town.” An explanatory detail that might otherwise have required a separate sentence is neatly dispatched along the way.

Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence. At least a dozen words will do this job for you: “but,” “yet,” “however,” “nevertheless,” “still,” “instead,” “thus,” “therefore,” “meanwhile,” “now,” “later,” “today,” “subsequently” and several more. I can’t overstate how much easier it is for readers to process a sentence if you start with “but” when you’re shifting direction. Or, conversely, how much harder it is if they must wait until the end to realize that you have shifted.

The common reaction is incredulous laughter. Bemused cynicism isn’t the only response to the old system. The current campus hostility is a symptom of the change. What is so eerie about these sentences is that they have no people in them. They also have no working verbs—only “is” or “isn’t.” The reader can’t visualize anybody performing some activity; all the meaning lies in impersonal nouns that embody a vague concept: “reaction,” “cynicism,” “response,” “hostility.” Turn these cold sentences around. Get people doing things: Most people just laugh with disbelief. Some people respond to the old system by turning cynical; others say … It’s easy to notice the change—you can see how angry all the students are.

Don’t overstate. You didn’t really consider jumping out the window. Life has more than enough truly horrible funny situations. Let the humor sneak up so we hardly hear it coming.

Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.

Surprisingly often a difficult problem in a sentence can be solved by simply getting rid of it.

Read your article aloud from beginning to end, always remembering where you left the reader in the previous sentence.

The reporter would say, “Well, in the lead I was writing color.” The assumption is that fact and color are two separate ingredients. They’re not; color is organic to the fact. Your job is to present the colorful fact.

Don’t annoy your readers by over-explaining—by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like “surprisingly,” “predictably” and “of course,” which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.

If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.

Motivation is at the heart of writing. If nonfiction is where you do your best writing, or your best teaching of writing, don’t be buffaloed into the idea that it’s an inferior species. The only important distinction is between good writing and bad writing.

But keep your notebook out of sight until you need it. There’s nothing less likely to relax a person than the arrival of a stranger with a stenographer’s pad. Both of you need time to get to know each other. Take a while just to chat, gauging what sort of person you’re dealing with, getting him or her to trust you. Never go into an interview without doing whatever homework you can. If you are interviewing a town official, know his or her voting record. If it’s an actress, know what plays or movies she has been in. You will be resented if you inquire about facts you could have learned in advance.

As for substance, be intensely selective. If you are describing a beach, don’t write that “the shore was scattered with rocks” or that “occasionally a seagull flew over.” Shores have a tendency to be scattered with rocks and to be flown over by seagulls. Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute.

What McPhee has done is to capture the idea of Juneau and Anchorage. Your main task as a travel writer is to find the central idea of the place you’re dealing with.

If travel is broadening, it should broaden more than just our knowledge of how a Gothic cathedral looks or how the French make wine. It should generate a whole constellation of ideas about how men and women work and play, raise their children, worship their gods, live and die.

But when he describes his journey he always says, “I never had the nerve before,” or “I was always afraid to try.” In other words, “I didn’t think I had permission.”

If you consciously write for a teacher or for an editor, you’ll end up not writing for anybody. If you write for yourself, you’ll reach the people you want to write for.

A tenet of journalism is that “the reader knows nothing.” As tenets go, it’s not flattering, but a technical writer can never forget it.

Take one more look at the sequential style. You’ll see a scientist leading you in logical steps, one sentence after another, along the path of the story he set out to tell. He is also enjoying himself and therefore writing enjoyably.

I’ve quoted from so many writers, writing about so many facets of the physical world, to show that they all come across first as people: men and women finding a common thread of humanity between themselves and their specialty and their readers. You can achieve the same rapport, whatever your subject.

If a scientific subject of that complexity can be made that clear and robust, in good English, with only a few technical words, which are quickly explained (kryton) or can be quickly looked up (fissile), any subject can be made clear and robust by all you writers who think you’re afraid of science and all you scientists who think you’re afraid of writing.

clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

If it’s too early to tell, don’t bother us with it, and as for what remains to be seen, everything remains to be seen. Take your stand with conviction.

“let’s not go peeing down both legs.”

Trust the sophistication of readers who do know what you’re doing, and don’t worry about the rest.

The columns that I wrote for Life made people laugh. But they had a serious purpose, which was to say: “Something crazy is going on here—some erosion in the quality of life, or some threat to life itself, and yet everyone assumes it’s normal.”

“If I criticize somebody,” he said, “it’s because I have higher hopes for the world, something good to replace the bad. I’m not saying what the Beat Generation says: ‘Go away because I’m not involved.’ I’m here and I’m involved.”

“It’s durable because it’s simple,” he said. “It’s built on four things that everybody does: sleeping, eating, raising a family and making money.”

“All humor must be about something—it must touch concretely on life,”

My commodity as a writer, whatever I’m writing about, is me. And your commodity is you.

For writers and other creative artists, knowing what not to do is a major component of taste.

“What does it take to be a comic writer?” He said, “It takes audacity and exuberance and gaiety, and the most important one is audacity.” Then he said: “The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good.”

He found in sportswriting what he wanted to do and what he loved doing, and because it was right for him he said more important things about American values than many writers who wrote about serious subjects—so seriously that nobody could read them.

They didn’t ask because I had another kind of credential: sincerity. It was obvious to those men that I really wanted to know how they did their work.

Writing to destroy and to scandalize can be as destructive to the writer as it is to the subject.

I’ve found that the most untaught and underestimated skill in nonfiction writing is how to organize a long article: how to put the jigsaw puzzle together.

All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don’t keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative—good old-fashioned storytelling—is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.

Readers can process only one idea at a time, and they do it in linear sequence.

In travel writing you should never forget that you are the guide. It’s not enough just to take your readers on a trip; you must take them on your trip. Make them identify with you—with your hopes and apprehensions.

Another startling fact that needs no embellishment—the tire-pumping—and another small joke at the end.

When you get such a message from your material—when your story tells you it’s over, regardless of what subsequently happened—look for the door.

There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with being published. Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is to come to terms with your life narrative.

Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and your readers will jump overboard to get away. Your product is you.

My final reducing advice can be summed up in two words: Think small.

Because they were important to me they also struck an emotional chord with readers, touching a universal truth that was important to them.

That’s a highly specialized subject for a piece of writing; not many people owned a mechanical baseball game. But everybody had a favorite childhood toy or game or doll. The fact that I had such a toy, and that it was brought back to me at the other end of my life, can’t help connecting with readers who would like to hold their favorite toy or game or doll one more time. They don’t identify with my baseball game; they identify with the idea of the game—a universal idea.

We know that verbs have more vigor than nouns, that active verbs are better than passive verbs, that short words and sentences are easier to read than long ones, that concrete details are easier to process than vague abstractions.

he said: “I always thought that there was at least one person in the stands who had never seen me play, and I didn’t want to let him down.”

Referred By

Your greatest writing asset is you