On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

On Writing Well is a craft book, and its principles haven’t changed since it was written 30 years ago. I don’t know what still newer marvels will make writing twice as easy in the next 30 years. But I do know they won’t make writing twice as good. That will still require plain old hard thinking—what E. B. White was doing in his boathouse—and the plain old tools of the English language. William Zinsser April 2006

“Do you put symbolism in your writing?” a student asked me. “Not if I can help it,” I replied. I have an unbroken record of missing the deeper meaning in any story, play or movie, and as for dance and mime, I have never had any idea of what is being conveyed.

Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it’s not a question of gimmicks to “personalize” the author. It’s a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.

Those of us who are trying to write well about the world we live in, or to teach students to write well about the world they live in, are caught in a time warp, where literature by definition still consists of forms that were certified as “literary” in the 19th century: novels and short stories and poems. But the great preponderance of what writers now write and sell, what book and magazine publishers publish and what readers demand is nonfiction.

I have no patience with the snobbery that says nonfiction is only journalism by another name and that journalism by any name is a dirty word.

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

Strive for fresh words and images. Leave “myriad” and their ilk to the poets. Leave “ilk” to anyone who will take it away.

Forty years later I still remember reading James Baldwin’s dynamic account, in The Fire Next Time, of being a boy preacher in a Harlem church. I still carry with me what it felt like to be in that sanctuary on a Sunday morning, because Baldwin pushed himself beyond mere description into a higher literary region of sounds and rhythms, of shared faith and shared emotions:

S. M. Ulam (Adventures of a Mathematician),

There’s no joy for the writer in such work, and certainly none for the reader. It’s language out of Star Trek,

In tennis the pot of gold is huge and the players are strung as tightly as their high-tech racquets—millionaires

an ear that can hear the difference between a sentence that limps and a sentence that lilts,

“What does it take to be a comic writer?” He said, “It takes audacity and exuberance and gaiety, and the most important one is audacity.” Then he said: “The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good.” The sentence went off in my head like a Roman candle: it stated the entire case for enjoyment. Then he added: “Even if he isn’t.” That sentence hit me almost as hard, because I knew that Perelman’s life contained more than the usual share of depression and travail. Yet he went to his typewriter every day and made the English language dance.

Red Smith, delivering the eulogy at the funeral of a fellow sportswriter, said, “Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick.”

Not being a writer, my father never worried about finding his “style.” He just wrote the way he talked, and now, when I read his sentences, I hear his personality and his humor, his idioms and his usages, many of them an echo of his college years in the early 1900s.