Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
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Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Active verbs are a writer’s best friend. Not every concept noun can be turned into an active verb. But how many people are even trying?
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Nouns that denote concepts are the death of vigorous writing. Good writing is specific and concrete.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
My advice to Type A writers begins with one word: Think! Ask yourself, “What do I want to say?” Then try to say it. Then ask yourself, “Have I said it?” Put yourself in the reader’s mind: Is your sentence absolutely clear to someone who knows nothing about the subject? If not, think about how to make it clear. Then rewrite it. Then think: “What do
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It forces us to keep asking, “Am I saying what I want to say?” Very often the answer is “No.” It’s a useful piece of information.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Overnight, Sputnik turned us into a nation obsessed by technology and determined to produce a bumper crop of technicians every year. Pure science has been an American deity ever since. Many science professors say that their discipline is now taught without any reference to its past traditions or to its present or future impact on society. “I was a
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its success was intimately connected with the bumbling way in which it was run. They saw both the prosperity and the inefficiency of the empire as results of the freedom that prevailed in it. Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not infrequently found together,
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
story to other generalists like myself. After that came the hard part: wrestling my new-found education into a narrative that moved logically from A to Z. The only thing I knew at the beginning was how I wanted the article to end:
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Whenever I embark on a story so overloaded with good material I despair of ever getting to the end—of covering all the ground I know I’ll need to cover to tell the story right. In my gloom it helps me to remember two things. One is that writing is linear and sequential. If sentence B logically follows sentence A, and if sentence C logically follows
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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,