William Zinsser Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.

  William Zinsser

  Trying, Knows, Asks

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• Good writers are visible just behind their words.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Behinds, Visible

  William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.21, Harper Collins

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• Every time you look at a blank piece of paper, you're doing something new. You have to step onto that blank territory and remind yourself the sky didn't fall in the last time you wrote. Writing is a question of overcoming your fears-and everybody has them.

  William Zinsser

  Fall, Writing, Sky

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• Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does - in his own words. His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Thinking, Talking

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• 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. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.

  William Zinsser

  Successful, Two, Mind

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• There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Want, Helping

  William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.5, Harper Collins

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• Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.

  William Zinsser

  Being Yourself, Writing, Say Anything

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• 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.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Two, People

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• Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.

  William Zinsser

  Interesting, Humanity, Ordinary

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• Writing is a craft not an art.

  William Zinsser

  Inspirational, Art, Writing

  William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.4, Harper Collins

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• Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

  William Zinsser

  Life, Writing, Trying

  William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.24, Harper Collins

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

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Numbers, Way

  William Knowlton Zinsser (1980). “On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.

  William Zinsser

  Anything Goes, World

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• I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.

  William Zinsser

  Thinking, Ends, Fine Things

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• 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.

  William Zinsser

  Fall, Writing, Together

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• 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.

  William Zinsser

  Country, Writing, Thinking

  William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.24, Harper Collins

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• But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.

  William Zinsser

  Jobs, Old Job, People

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• Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.

  William Zinsser

  Strong, Glory, Abraham

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• Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.

  William Zinsser

  Eloquence, Transactions, Invites

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• Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.

  William Zinsser

  Reading, Writing, Today

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• Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Artist, Piano

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• Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.

  William Zinsser

  Errors, Marketing, Vagueness

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• Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.

  William Zinsser

  Mistake, Corporations, Language

  William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.14, Harper Collins

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• 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 - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not so high.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Pride, Sight

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• 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.

  William Zinsser

  Important, Firsts, Reader

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