Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
amazon.com
Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
of writing are dismally aware of the inclination of writers to equate the worth of their writing with the worth of who they are. The equation goes: “You think this is a terrible paper, therefore you must think I’m a terrible person.” The thought is natural, perhaps almost inevitable: when we write we put some part of our self on paper for other
... See moreWilliam Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
I believe, however, that writers often conspire in their own insecurity. (By “writers” I also mean every student of high school age and older who writes a paper of any kind.) Teachers
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
The trouble arises when jargon becomes a crutch—when its users become so dependent on their private terminology that they claim they can’t express themselves in any other way. Social scientists, for instance, are addicted almost beyond mortal help.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
BREVITY. In writing, short is usually better than long. Short words and sentences are easier for the eye and the mind to process than long ones, and an article that makes its case succinctly is the highest form of courtesy to the reader. Somehow it never occurs to sloppy writers that they are being fundamentally rude. Most pieces can be cut by 50
... See moreWilliam Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Wittgenstein and topology, “in” jokes and a general determination to keep all vulgar sensibilities at bay, then we shall have great difficulty in finding out what the author intends us to understand. We shall have to reason it out therefore, much as we reasoned out a passage in some language we didn’t fully understand.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
The rhetorical use of obscurity, however, is a vice…. If the text is made hard to follow because of non sequiturs, digressions, paradoxes, impressive-sounding references to Gödel,
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Actually a simple style is the result of harder thinking and harder work than they are willing or able to do.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
writers are up against nothing less than the fundamental anarchy of the universe; entropy, prince of disorder, is sprinkling noise on everything we write. Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise. Pomposity is noise. Clutter is noise: all those unnecessary adjectives (“ongoing
... See moreWilliam Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
One of the recurring themes of Grammatical Man is the need to protect the integrity of the message. In information parlance, the enemy is “noise”—a perfect word for all the random interferences with what man or nature is trying to say.