On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.

Clutter is the laborious phrase that has pushed out the short word that means the same thing.

Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice.

Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.

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.

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 nonfiction is where you do your best writing, or your best teaching of writing, don’t be buffaloed into the idea that it’s an inferior species. The only important distinction is between good writing and bad writing. Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call 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.

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.

Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Orwell’s version goes: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thoughts. Remember that what you write is often the only chance you’ll get to present yourself to someone whose business or money or good will you need. If what you write is ornate, or pompous, or fuzzy, that’s how you’ll be perceived. The reader has no other choice.

John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, George Plimpton’s Paper Lion and George F. Will’s Men at Work—books about tennis, pro football and baseball—take us deeply into the lives of the players.

One of the classics in the literature of baseball is “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” John Updike’s account of Ted Williams’s final game,

Even Babe Ruth was ushered down from the sanitized slopes of Olympus and converted into a real person, with appetites as big as his girth, in Robert Creamer’s fine biography Babe. The same qualities would go into Creamer’s later book, Stengel.

But nobody remembers those books today; readers won’t connect with whining. Don’t use your memoir to air old grievances and to settle old scores; get rid of that anger somewhere else. The memoirs that we do remember from the 1990s are the ones that were written with love and forgiveness, like Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, and Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life. Although the childhoods they describe were painful, the writers are as hard on their younger selves as they are on their elders. We are not victims, they want us to know. We come from a tribe of fallible people and we have survived without resentment to get on with our lives. For them, writing a memoir became an act of healing.