On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

One moral of this story is that you should always collect more material than you will use.

Knowing when to end an article is far more important than most writers realize. You should give as much thought to choosing your last sentence as you did to your first.

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.

You remind the reader of what can, in sum, be noted. You go gleaning one more time in insights you have already adduced.

The positive reason for ending well is that a good last sentence—or last paragraph—is a joy in itself. It gives the reader a lift, and it lingers when the article is over.

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 th...

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.

Something I often do in my writing is to bring the story full circle—to strike at the end an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning. It gratifies my sense of symmetry, and it also pleases the reader, completing with its resonance the journey we set out on together.

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.

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

If you find yourself hopelessly mired in a long sentence, it’s probably because you’re trying to make the sentence do more than it can reasonably do—perhaps express two dissimilar thoughts.

Among good writers it is the short sentence that predominates,

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.

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.

Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual—it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain. Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting,

We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can’t believe that it wasn’t born perfect.

You won’t write well until you understand that writing is an evolving process, not a finished product.

the last word is the one that stays in the reader’s ear and gives the sentence its punch.

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don’t like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite.

With every small refinement I feel that I’m coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that won the game.

The longer I work at the craft of writing, the more I realize that there’s nothing more interesting than the truth.

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.

It combined my lifelong vocation with my lifelong addiction—which is one of the best things that can happen to a writer; people will write better and with more enjoyment if they write about what they care about.

The reader plays a major role in the act of writing and must be given room to play it.

There’s no subject you don’t have permission to write about.

he began to invoke the names of authors like Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow and William Styron, whom we surely regarded as literary giants. We said those writers didn’t happen to be our models, and we mentioned people like Lewis Thomas and Joan Didion and Gary Wills. He had never heard of them.

Nonfiction became the new American literature.

Add all the books combining history and biography that have distinguished American letters in recent years: David McCullough’s Truman and The Path Between the Seas; Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63; Richard Kluger’s The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune; Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Thomas L. Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem; J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of American Families; Edmund Morris’s Theodore Rex; Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America; Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa; Ronald Steel’s Walter Lippmann and the American Century; Marion Elizabeth Rodgers’s Mencken: The American Iconoclast; David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire; Andrew Delbanco’s Melville; Mark Stevens’s and Annalyn Swan’s de Kooning: An American Master.

If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion;

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.

The books I remember most vividly from my first reading of them tend to be memoirs: books such as André Aciman’s Out of Egypt, Michael J. Arlen’s Exiles, Russell Baker’s Growing Up, Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life, Moss Hart’s Act One, John Houseman’s Run-Through, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, V. S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door, Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, Leonard Woolf’s Growing.

Unlike autobiography, which spans an entire life, memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it. The memoir writer takes us back to some corner of his or her past that was unusually intense—childhood, for instance—or that was framed by war or some other social upheaval.

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.

Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all.

Linseed oil, for example, has a kind of memory. Once exposed to light, even if only briefly, it will change consistency and speed the second time it is exposed. It will “remember” its first encounter with the light.

I recited my four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

His style was not only graceful; it was strong enough to carry strong convictions.

“Well,” the man from Texas would break in, “let’s not go peeing down both legs.”

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—“the strange incongruity,” as Stephen Leacock put it, “between our aspiration and our achievement.”

“Humor can be dissected, as a frog can,” E. B. White once wrote, “but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

In short, our class began by striving first for humor and hoping to wing a few truths along the way. We ended by striving for truth and hoping to add humor along the way. Ultimately we realized that the two are intertwined.

the effortless style is achieved by strenuous effort and constant refining.

Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good. But readers will stop reading you if they think you are talking down to them. Nobody wants to be patronized.

Write with respect for the English language at its best—and for readers at their best.

Clichés are one of the things you should keep listening for when you rewrite and read your successive drafts aloud. Notice how incriminating they sound, convicting you of being satisfied to use the same old chestnuts instead of making an effort to replace them with fresh phrases of your own. Clichés are the enemy of taste.

Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft.

Find the best writers in the fields that interest you and read their work aloud. Get their voice and their taste into your ear—their attitude toward language. Don’t worry that by imitating them you’ll lose your own voice and your own identity. Soon enough you will shed those skins and become who you are supposed to become.

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. It doesn’t bother me that a certain number of readers will not be amused; I know that a fair chunk of the population has no sense of humor—no idea that there are people in the world trying to entertain them.

Because authors of fiction are writing about a world of their own invention, often in an allusive style that they have also invented (Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo), we have no right to tell them, “That’s wrong.” We can only say, “It doesn’t work for me.” Nonfiction writers get no such break. They are infinitely accountable: to the facts, to the people they interviewed, to the locale of their story and to the events that happened there. They are also accountable to their craft and all its perils of excess and disorder: losing the reader, confusing the reader, boring the reader, not keeping the reader engaged from beginning to end.