Title: On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Author(s): William Zinsser
Year: 2006 (7th ed.)
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. I often find myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would interest me — some scientific quest, perhaps. What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field. How was he drawn into it? What emotional baggage did he bring along? How did it change his life? […] This is the personal transaction that’s at the heart of good nonfiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important qualities that this book will go in search of: humanity and warmth. (5)
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. […] It won’t do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it’s usually because the writer hasn’t been careful enough. (8)
Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know. Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it? […] Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves, as if they were working on any other project that requires logic… (9)
A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. (9)
Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that can’t be there. (12)
style is organic to the person doing the writing […] This is the problem of writers who set out deliberately to garnish their prose. You lose whatever it is that makes you unique. The reader will notice if you are putting on airs. Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself. (19)
Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going. (23)
Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience — every reader is a different person. Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new. (24)
You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. (24)
there’s no excuse for losing readers through sloppy workmanship. If they doze off in the middle of your article because you have been careless about a technical detail, the fault is yours. But on the larger issue of whether the reader likes you, or likes what you are saying or how you are saying it, or agrees with it, or feels an affinity for your sense of humor or your vision of life, don’t give him a moment’s worry. You are who you are, he is who he is, and either you’ll get along or you won’t. (25)
Relax and say what you want to say. And since style is who you are, you only need to be true to yourself to find it gradually emerging from under the accumulated clutter and debris, growing more distinctive every day. Perhaps the style won’t solidify for years as your style, your voice. Just as it takes time to find yourself as a person, it takes time to find yourself as a stylist, and even then your style will change as you grow older. (25)
The only way to avoid [cliche] is to care deeply about words. If you find yourself writing that someone recently enjoyed a spell of illness, or that a business has been enjoying a slump, ask yourself how much they enjoyed it. Notice the decisions that other writers make in their choice of words and be finicky about the ones you select from the vast supply. The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original. (34)
Good usage, to me, consists of using good words if they already exist — as they almost always do — to express myself clearly and simply to someone else. You might say it’s how I verbalize the interpersonal. (45)
Most nonfiction writers have a definitiveness complex. They feel that they are under some obligation — to the subject, to their honor, to the gods of writing — to make their article the last word. What you think is definitive today will turn undefinitive by tonight, and writers who doggedly pursue every last fact will find themselves pursuing the rainbow and never settling down to write. […] Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write. (52)
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. Not two thoughts, or five — just one. (52)
How long should the lead be? One or two paragraphs? Four or five? There’s no pat answer. Some leads hook the reader with just a few well-baited sentences; others amble on for several pages, exerting a slow but steady pull. Every article poses a different problem, and the only valid test is: does it work? (54)
the lead must do some real work. It must provide hard details that tell the reader why the piece was written and why he ought to read it. But don’t dwell on the reason. Coax the reader a little more; keep him inquisitive. Continue to build. Every paragraph should amplify the one that preceded it. (55)
salvation often lies not in the writer’s style but in some odd fact he or she was able to discover. (57)
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. (58)
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. (61)
The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right. They didn’t expect the article to end so soon, or so abruptly, or to say what it said. But they know it when they see it. […] What delights us is the [writer’s] perfect control. (64)
Surprise is the most refreshing element in nonfiction writing. If something surprises you it will also surprise — and delight — the people you are writing for, especially as you conclude your story and send them on their way. (66)
Most adjectives are also unnecessary. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already in the noun. […] If you want to make a value judgment about daffodils, choose an adjective like “garish.” If you’re in a prt of the country where the dirt is red, feel free to mention the red dirt. Those adjectives would do a job that the noun alone wouldn’t be doing. […] Not every oak has to be gnarled. The adjective that exists solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader. (69-70)
Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. […] The large point is one of authority. 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. (70)
Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence. […] 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. Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with “but.” If that’s what you learned, unlearn it — there’s no stronger word at the start. It announces total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change. If you need relief from too many sentences beginning with “but,” switch to however. It is, however, a weaker word and needs careful placement. (73)
Look for all the places where one of these short words will instantly convey the same meaning as a long and dismal clause. (74)
Always use “that” unless it makes your meaning ambiguous. […] If your sentence needs a comma to achieve its precise meaning, it probably needs “which.” (75)
Surprisingly often a different problem in a sentence can be solved by simply getting rid of it. Unfortunately, this solution is usually the last one that occurs to writers in a jam. […] When you find yourself at such an impasse, look at the troublesome element and ask, “Do I need it at all?” Probably you don’t. It was trying to do an unnecessary job all along — that’s why it was giving you so much grief. (79)
there’s nothing more interesting than the truth. […] color is organic to the fact. Your job is to present the colorful fact. (88-89)
Most men and women lead lives, if not of quiet desperation, at least of desperate quietness, and they jump at a chance to talk about their work to an outsider who seems eager to listen. (105)
The dismal truth is that [travel writing]‘s very hard. It must be hard, because it’s in this area that most writers — professional and amateur — produce not only their worst work but work that is just plain terrible. The terrible work has nothing to do with some terrible flaw of character. On the contrary, it results from the virtue of enthusiasm. Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels. (117)
As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self — the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells — and keep an objective eye on the reader. (117)
choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it’s probably one of the countless cliches that have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that you have to make a special effort not to use them. […] As for substance, be intensely selective. (118)
Practice writing this kind of travel piece, and just because I call it a travel piece I don’t mean you have to go to Morocco or Mombasa. Go to your local mall, or bowling alley, or day-care center. But whatever place you write about, go there often enough to isolate the qualities that make it distinctive. Usually this will be some combination of the place and the people who inhabit it. If it’s your local bowling alley it will be a mixture of the atmosphere inside and the regular patrons. (126)
To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth. (136)
The crucial ingredient in memoir is, of course, people. Sounds and smells and songs and sleeping porches will take you just so far. Finally you must summon back the men and women and children who notably crossed your life. What was it that made them memorable — what turn of mind, what crazy habits? (143-144)
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. You can’t assume that your readers know what you assume everybody knows, or that they still remember what was once explained to them. (148)
Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons. It forces you to make sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you. I’ve found it to be a breakthrough for many students whose thinking was disorderly. (148-149)
Imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more. The second sentence broadens what was stated first, making the pyramid wider, and the third sentence broadens the second, so that you can gradually move beyond fact into significance and speculation (149)
You can take much of the mystery out of science writing by helping the reader to identify with the scientific work being done. Again, this means looking for the human element (152)
Always start with too much material. Then give your reader just enough. (156)
just because people work for an institution, they don’t have to write like one. Institutions can be warmed up. Administrators can be turned into human beings. Information can be imparted clearly and without pomposity. You only have to remember that readers identify with people, not with abstractions like “profitability,” or with Latinate nouns like “utilization” and “implementation,” or with inert constructions in which nobody can be visualized doing something: “pre-feasibility studies are in the paperwork stage.” (166)
Once an administrator rises to a certain level, nobody ever points out to him again the beauty of a simple declarative sentence, or shows him how his writing has become swollen with pompous generalizations. (172)
There is a deep yearning for human contact and a resentment of bombast. (172)
If you work for an institution, whatever your job, whatever your level, be yourself when you write. (177)
Red Smith had no patience with self-important sportswriting. He said it was always helpful to remember that baseball is a game that little boys play. That also goes for football and basketball and hockey and tennis and most other games. (186)
True wit, however, is rare, and a thousand barbed arrows fall at the feet of the archer for every one that flies. It’s also too facile an approach if you want to write serious criticism, for the only epigrams that have survived are cruel ones. It’s far easier to bury Caesar than praise him — and that goes for Cleopata, too. But to say why you think a play is good, in words that don’t sound banal, is one of the hardest chores in the business. (194)
critics should like — or, better still, love — the medium they are reviewing. […] It’s not necessary for the critic to like every film; criticism is only one person’s opinion. But he should go to every movie wanting to like it. If he is more often disappointed than pleased, it’s because the film has failed to live up to its best possibilities. (195)
don’t give away too much of the plot. […] use specific detail. […] In book reviewing this means allowing the author’s words to do their own documentation. […] In reviewing a play, don”t just tell us that the set is “striking.” Describe its various levels, or how it is ingeniously lit, or how it helps the actors to make their entrances and exits as a conventional set would not. Put your readers in your theater seat. Help them to see what you saw. (196-197)
How should a good piece of criticism start? You must make an immediate effort to orient your readers to special world they are about to enter. Even if they are broadly educated men and women they need to be told or reminded of certain facts. You can’t just throw them in the water and expect them to swim easily. The water needs to be warmed up. (203)
Literary criticism that doesn’t stir a few combative juices is hardly worth writing, and there are few spectator sports as enjoyable as a good academic brawl. […] What is crucial for you as the writer is to express your opinion firmly. (205)
“I’m here and I’m involved”: make that your creed if you want to write serious humor. […] Humor is not a separate organism that can survive on its own frail metabolism. It’s a special angle of vision granted to certain writers who already write good English. They aren’t writing about life that’s essentially ludicrous; they are writing about life that’s essentially serious, but their eye falls on areas where serious hopes are mocked by some ironic turn of fate (212-213)
Don’t search for the outlandish and scorn what seems too ordinary; you will touch more chords by finding what’s funny in what you know to be true. Finally, don’t strain for laughs; humor is built on surprise, and you can surprise the reader only so often. (213)
another function of the humorist is to represent himself or herself as the victim or dunce, helpless in most situations. It’s therapy for readers, enabling them to feel superior to the writer, or at least to identify with a fellow victim. (227)
knowing what not to do is a major component of taste. […] Cliches are the enemy of taste. […] Non-taste reaches for the corny synonym, which has the further disadvantage of being imprecise (233-235)
eloquence runs on a deeper current. It moves us with what it leaves unsaid, touching off echoes in what we already know from our reading, our religion and our heritage. (238)
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. (242)
Writers have to jump-start themselves at the moment of performance, no less than actors and dancers and painters and musicians. There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in the current of their energy […] that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you. (243)
Fear of writing gets planted in most Americans at an early age, usually at school, and it never entirely goes away. The blank piece of paper or the blank computer screen, waiting to be filled with our wonderful words, can freeze us into not writing any words at all, or writing words that are less than wonderful. I’m often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task — the day’s work — and not with some enjoyment. […] With each rewrite I try to force my personality onto the material. (243-244)
Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s almost the whole point of becoming a writer. I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education. If you write about subjects you think you would enjoy knowing about, your enjoyment will show in what you write. Learning is a tonic. (245))
The moral for nonfiction writers is: think broadly about your assignment. Don’t assume that an article for Audubon has to be strictly about nature, or an article for Car & Driver strictly about cars. Push the boundaries of your subject and see where it takes you. Bring some part of your own life to it; it’s not your version of the story until you write it. (247)
This fixation on the finished article causes writers a lot of trouble, deflecting them from all the earlier decisions that have to be made to determine its shape and voice and content. (253)
As an editor and a teacher 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. (254)
any time you can tell a story in the form of a quest or pilgrimage you’ll be ahead of the game. Readers bearing their own associations will do some of your work for you. (260)
Intention is what we wish to accomplish with our writing. Call it the writer’s soul. We can write to affirm and to celebrate, or we can write to debunk and to destroy; the choice is ours. […] But nobody can make us write what we don’t want to write. We get to keep intention. Nonfiction writers often forget that they are not required to acquiesce in tawdry work, to carry the trash for magazine editors who have an agenda of their own — to sell a commercial product. Writing is related to character. If your values are sound, your writing will be sound. (260)
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. (261-262)
Much of the trouble that writers get into comes from trying to make one sentence do too much work. Never be afraid to break a long sentence into two short ones, or even three. (262)
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. This means giving them some idea of who you are. (265)
Don’t rummage around in your past — or your family’s past — to find episodes that you think are “important” enough to be worthy of including in your memoir. 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. (290-291)
I’ve always tried to write as well as I could by my own standards; I’ve never changed my style to fit the size or the presumed education of the audience I was writing for. […] 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. (295-297)
If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you’ve written against the various middlemen — whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not as high. (298)
to defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive. (299)