On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

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 is no minimum length for a sentence that’s acceptable in the eyes of God.

I don’t like plurals; they weaken writing because they are less specific than the singular, less easy to visualize. I’d like every writer to visualize one reader struggling to read what he or she has written. Nevertheless I found three or four hundred places where I could eliminate “he,” “him,” “his,” “himself” or “man,” mainly by switching to the plural, with no harm done; the sky didn’t fall in.

Today there’s no area of life—present or past—that isn’t being made accessible to ordinary readers by men and women writing with high seriousness and grace. Add to this literature of fact all the disciplines that were once regarded as academic, like anthropology and economics and social history, that have become the domain of nonfiction writers and of broadly curious readers.

Somewhere in every drab institution are men and women who have a fierce attachment to what they are doing and are rich repositories of lore.

Educated people who you think have been talking into your tape recorder with linear precision turn out to have been stumbling so aimlessly over the sands of language that they haven’t completed a single decent sentence.

What about your obligation to the person you interviewed? To what extent can you cut or juggle his words? This question vexes every writer returning from a first interview—and it should. But the answer isn’t hard if you keep in mind two standards: brevity and fair play.

Quotes are livelier when you break them up, making periodic appearances in your role as guide. You are still the writer—don’t relinquish control.

If one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, if somebody fell into the awesome Grand Canyon, that would be worth hearing about.

Will it fascinate the reader? It won’t. The mere agglomeration of detail is no free pass to the reader’s interest. The detail must be significant.

If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it’s probably one of the countless clichés 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.

To have a decent career in this country it’s important to be able to write decent English.

Your memory is almost always good for material when your other wells go dry.

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.

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.

It’s the principle of leading readers who know nothing, step by step, to a grasp of subjects they didn’t think they had an aptitude for or were afraid they were too dumb to understand.

Another way of making science accessible is to write like a person and not like a scientist. It’s the same old question of being yourself. Just because you’re dealing with a scholarly discipline that’s usually reported in a style of dry pedantry is no reason why you shouldn’t write in good fresh English.

The man who catches a meningococcus is in considerably less danger for his life, even without chemotherapy, than the meningococci with the bad luck to catch a man.”

During the Manhattan Project, for example, the Y–12 EMIS facility at Oak Ridge in Tennessee used more power than Canada, plus the entire U.S. stockpile of silver;

The memo, the business letter, the administrative report, the financial analysis, the marketing proposal, the note to the boss, the fax, the e-mail, the Post-it—all the pieces of paper that circulate through your office every day are forms of writing. Take them seriously. Countless careers rise or fall on the ability or the inability of employees to state a set of facts, summarize a meeting or present an idea coherently.

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

plain talk will not be easily achieved in corporate America. Too much vanity is on the line.

Managers at every level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind.

I said that the writers had to keep going back to the engineer until he finally made himself intelligible. They said the engineer didn’t want to be made intelligible: if he spoke too simply he would look like a jerk to his peers. I said that their responsibility was to the facts and to the reader, not to the vanity of the engineer.