March 9th, 2008 | Published in Writing, Quotes
Whatever form of nonfiction you write, it will come alive in proportion to the number of ‘quotes’ you can weave into it as you go along.
—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 101.
March 1st, 2008 | Published in Writing, Quotes
Writing is like a good watch – it should run smoothly and have no extra parts.
—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 85.
February 24th, 2008 | Published in Writing, Quotes
There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.
—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 71.
February 17th, 2008 | Published in Writing, Quotes
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 is said. But they know it when they see it.
—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, pp. 65-6.
February 11th, 2008 | Published in Writing, Quotes
[Y]our readers hear the laborious sound of cranking. They notice what you are doing and how bored you are by it. They feel the stirrings of resentment. Why didn’t you give more thought to how you were going to wind this thing up? Or are you summarizing because you think they’re too dumb to get the point? Still, you keep cranking. But the readers have another option. They quit.
–William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 65.
February 6th, 2008 | Published in Writing, Quotes
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.
–William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 64.
January 31st, 2008 | Published in Writing, Books & Reading, Quotes, Literature
[Huck’s voice] is not Mark Twain’s voice. It is the voice, we can only say, of a great genius named Huckleberry Finn, who inhabited a somewhat lesser genius named Mark Twain, who inhabited a frustrated businessman named Samuel Clemens.
–Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 73.
January 28th, 2008 | Published in Writing, Quotes
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third sentence, it’s equally dead. Of such a progression of sentences, each tugging the reader forward until he is hooked, a writer constructs that fateful unit, the “lead.”
–William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 55.