Writing to Learn Quotes

“I’ve also discovered that knowledge is not as compartmented as I thought it was. It’s not a hundred different rooms inhabited by strangers; it’s all one house. Hermes and the periodic table are equally its household gods, and writing is the key that opens the door.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Writing, however, isn’t a special language that belongs to English teachers and a few other sensitive souls who have a “gift for words.” Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly—about any subject at all.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Far too many Americans are prevented from doing useful work because they never learned to express themselves. Contrary to general belief, writing isn’t something that only “writers” do; writing is a basic skill for getting through life.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Learning, he seemed to be saying, takes a multitude of forms; expect to find them in places where you least expect them to be.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document—a letter, for instance—had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“what we want to do we will do well.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“writing is primarily an exercise in logic and that words are just tools designed to do a specific job.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“I had been sitting in Joan Countryman’s living room for two hours talking about mathematics. My pulse was steady, the hand that held my note-taking pencil didn’t shake and wasn’t even clammy. Where was that old math anxiety? I hadn’t been at any loss for questions; they came to me naturally. Like the process of writing, the process of asking questions had been a form of learning, raising further questions and telling me what I wanted to know next. I was genuinely curious. It never occurred to me that this was a subject I wasn’t supposed to be any good at. What did occur to me was that mathematics was not some arcane system of numbers; it was a language, a way of putting thoughts together. I might never master the language—my checkbook might still go unbalanced—but at least I had begun to glimpse what the language was trying to say and how it could help people to understand the world around them.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Nonfiction writing should always have a point: It should leave the reader with a set of facts, or an idea, or a point of view, that he didn’t have before he started reading.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Writing is the handmaiden of leadership; Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Moral: There are no cheap substitutes for the best.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“In visual reading, like verbal reading, the completeness of the reading relates directly to the quality of the reader’s stored information.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“There is rather an unending night, as old as the sea itself. For most of its creatures, groping their way endlessly through its black waters, it must be a place of hunger, where food is scarce and hard to find, a shelterless place where there is no sanctuary from ever-present enemies, where one can only move on and on, from birth to death, through an endless night, confined as in a prison to his own particular layer of the sea.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“tha”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“It was also a method of getting students to learn who were afraid of learning.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“The value of a baccalaureate education for nurses today,” said Professor Miller, “is that it helps them to become leaders and decision-makers and advocates. The caring role is critical, and often nurses are the only people in a community who are in a position to see what’s happening to a family when something goes wrong—for instance, when the child of two working parents gets sick—and to find a solution.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“got them reading the essays of Victor Weisskopf and books like Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey, Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since Darwin and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“That’s why I liked the two trends that Professor Potts mentioned: educating future scientists to be more attuned to the impact of their work, and educating the rest of us to be more scientifically literate. It does us no good to just feel a growing sense of jeopardy over what the scientists are “up to.” As citizens we’re responsible for what we know and what we don’t know.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Indeed the quality I call resonance is what hits me hardest in all writing. And what resounds is not merely things said earlier but common knowledge and experience that everyone can relate to.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content; the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.) Only when the job was over did I enjoy it.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“But too many facts would kill the reader’s enjoyment of the adventure itself, which, beneath all its layers, was just an old-fashioned story of a pilgrim on a quest.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Who am I editing for?” One of my principles is that there is no typical anybody; every reader is different. I edit for myself and I write for myself. I assume that if I consider something interesting or funny, a certain number of other people will too. If they don’t, they have two inalienable rights—they can fire the editor and they can stop reading the writer. Meanwhile I draw on two sources of energy that I commend to anyone trying to survive in this vulnerable craft: confidence and ego. If you don’t have confidence in what you’re doing you might as well not do it.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“In his monthly column in Natural History magazine and in books like The Panda’s Thumb I’ve found myself caught up in the riddles of evolution and the miracles of the natural world. Gould never forgets one of nature’s oldest laws: that everybody loves a story. Every month he tells me a remarkable story and then tells me why he thinks it came out the way it did.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Putting an idea into written words is like defrosting the windshield: The idea, so vague out there in the murk, slowly begins to gather itself into a sensible shape.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“I thought of all the subjects where the teacher never gets this inside look, where students are graded solely on the basis of a right or a wrong answer.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Writing, I reminded them, can’t be taught or learned in a vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: “This is how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.” In many subjects, students don’t even know that a literature exists—that mathematics, for instance, consists of more than right and wrong answers, that physics consists of more than right or wrong lab reports. I”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Probably no subject is too hard if people take the trouble to think and write and read clearly. Maybe, in fact, it’s time to redefine the “three R’s”—they should be reading, ’riting and reasoning. Together they add up to learning. It’s by writing about a subject we’re trying to learn that we reason our way to what it means. Reasoning is a lost skill of the children of the TV generation, with their famously short attention span. Writing can help them get it back.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“As baggage I would be taking along a number of strong opinions on why so many Americans don’t learn to write and why they live in so much fear of trying. One of them has to do with English teachers. Under the American system, they are the people who teach our children to write. If they don’t, nobody will. They do it with dedication, and I hope they’ll be rewarded, if not here on earth, at least in heaven, for there’s almost no pedagogical task harder and more tiring than teaching somebody to write. But there are all kinds of reasons why English teachers ought to get some relief. One is that they shouldn’t have to assume the whole responsibility for imparting a skill that’s basic to every area of life. That should be everybody’s job. That’s citizenship.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“What we found developing at Gustavus Adolphus was a sense that we should all be sharing the responsibility for teaching writing. We formed a writing committee that consisted of professors from many different disciplines, and we invited proposals for ‘W’ courses from the entire faculty. The response was instantaneous. As soon as the ownership of writing by the English department was lost, people in other fields said, ‘I’d be willing to give it a try.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All