Writing Places: The Life Journey of a Writer and Teacher

“What our readers hunger for,” I was told by Clifton Fadiman, a pillar of the club’s board of judges from 1944 until his death in 1999, “is books that explain. William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich explained a whole age to us.” A majority of the club’s biggest sellers, Fadiman pointed out, have been books that readers found helpf

I typed the usual something: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” Or maybe it was the one about the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy sleeping dog, which uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. I don’t think I did “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs,” that printer’s darling, which uses the 26 letters more succin

In 1991 the nation of Zimbabwe bought our building and everyone was evicted.

That, finally, is the life-changing message of On Writing Well: Simplify your language and thereby find your humanity.

The store was established in 1977 by two men from Bombay, and I once asked one of them, Mohan, how many customers it gets every day; it’s open from 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. He thought a moment and estimated the number at 4,000. By my own calculations that seemed about right: figure 14 hours times 60 minutes times 4 or 5 customers in any one minute. N

As a boy I had been taken with my three older sisters to Best & Co. and DePinna’s, upscale stores on Fifth Avenue that expediently sold both girls’ and boys’ clothes, and there I was properly outfitted for a proper life. Now, in the 1950s, Best and DePinna’s were still doing business, just a few blocks to the east. But in the geography of my li

I also tried to stop using phrases like “of course” and adverbs like “surprisingly,” “predictably,” “understandably” and “ironically,” which place a value on a sentence before the reader has a chance to read it. Readers, I learned, are not as dumb as the writer thinks; they must be given room to play their role in the act of writing—to discover for

I learned to delete every sentence or phrase or word that told readers something they had already been enabled to know or were bright enough to deduce.

My sentences almost never come out right at first, and I endlessly try to repair them.