On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

“Joe saw him” is strong. “He was seen by Joe” is weak.

Most adverbs are unnecessary.

Don’t tell us that the radio blared loudly; “blare” connotes loudness. Don’t write that someone clenched his teeth tightly; there’s no other way to clench teeth. Again and again in careless writing, strong verbs are weakened by redundant adverbs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Don’t say you weren’t too happy because the hotel was pretty expensive. Say you weren’t happy because the hotel was expensive. Don’t tell us you were quite fortunate. How fortunate is that? Don’t describe an event as rather spectacular or very awesome. Words like “spectacular” and “awesome” don’t submit to measurement. “Very” is a useful word to achieve emphasis, but far more often it’s clutter. There’s no need to call someone very methodical. Either he is methodical or he isn’t.

The Period. There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.

The Exclamation Point. Don’t use it unless you must to achieve a certain effect.

The Dash. Somehow this invaluable tool is widely regarded as not quite proper—a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English.

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.”

The Colon. The colon has begun to look even more antique than the semicolon, and many of its functions have been taken over by the dash. But it still serves well its pure role of bringing your sentence to a brief halt before you plunge into, say, an itemized list. “The brochure said the ship would stop at the following ports: Oran, Algiers, Naples, Brindisi, Piraeus, Istanbul and Beirut.” You can’t beat the colon for work like that.

Always use “that” unless it makes your meaning ambiguous.

compared to “which”

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.

Credibility is just as fragile for a writer as for a President. Don’t inflate an incident to make it more outlandish than it actually was. If the reader catches you in just one bogus statement that you are trying to pass off as true, everything you write thereafter will be suspect. It’s too great a risk, and not worth taking.

While you slept, your writer’s mind didn’t. A writer is always working. Stay alert to the currents around you. Much of what you see and hear will come back, having percolated for days or months or even years through your subconscious mind, just when your conscious mind, laboring to write, needs it.

THE QUICKEST FIX. Surprisingly often a difficult 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.

Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual—it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.

The best solutions simply eliminate “he” and its connotations of male ownership by using other pronouns or by altering some other component of the sentence. “We” is a handy replacement for “he.” “Our” and “the” can often replace “his.”

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept.

The longer I work at the craft of writing, the more I realize that there’s nothing more interesting than the truth. What people do—and what people say—continues to take me by surprise with its wonderfulness, or its quirkiness, or its drama, or its humor, or its pain. Who could invent all the astonishing things that really happen? I increasingly find myself saying to writers and students, “Trust your material.” It seems to be hard advice to follow.

There’s no subject you don’t have permission to write about. Students often avoid subjects close to their heart—skateboarding, cheerleading, rock music, cars—because they assume that their teachers will regard those topics as “stupid.” No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.