On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction

This is the problem of writers who set out deliberately to garnish their prose. You lose whatever it is that makes you unique.

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.

As soon as the interview is over, fill in all the missing words you can remember. Complete the uncompleted sentences.

Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I’d say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it. But cultivate the best models.

your lead must capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading. It must cajole him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humor, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question.

I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work.

There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.

But after that your duty is to the reader. He or she deserves the tightest package. Most people meander in their conversation, filling it with irrelevant tales and trivia. Much of it is delightful, but it’s still trivia. Your interview will be strong to the extent that you get the main points made without waste. Therefore if you find on page 5 of y

work hard to master the tools. Simplify, prune and strive for order. Think of this as a mechanical act, and soon your sentences will become cleaner.