William Zinsser
William Zinsser
William Knowlton Zinsserwas an American writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher. He began his career as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked as a feature writer, drama editor, film critic and editorial writer. He was a longtime contributor to leading magazines...
games small-details details
The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
fall house verbs
If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
writing people style
Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
jobs mean writing
You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into an entertainment. Usually this means giving the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of devices will do the job.... These seeming amusements in fact become your 'style.' When we say we like the style of certain writers, what we mean is that we like their personality as they express it on paper.
lonely good-day writing
Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.
reading writing men
Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.
writing choices celebrate
Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy; the choice is ours.
self adjectives detectives
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.
toms
Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
christian religious important
As a writer I try to operate within a framework of Christian principles, and the words that are important to me are religious words: witness, pilgrimage, intention.
fall writing 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.
strong glory abraham
Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
writing two people
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.
trying knows asks
Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.