Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think

Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

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great paper in philosophy is often one that tells me why the student couldn’t get where he wanted to go. That’s progress. It’s better than deluding yourself that something was proved that really hadn’t been.”

William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

They can be cured only by that most painful of surgical procedures: operating on what the writer has actually written.

William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

But I had never thought about thinking as a process. How does it work? Why do some people think straighter than others? What are the factors that prevent us from thinking clearly? Can it be taught? I made a note to buy The Art of Thinking when I got back home. I suspected that it would help me to see how so much fuzz gets into the writing machinery

William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. It’s a physical activity, unlike reading. Writing requires us to operate some kind of mechanism—pencil, pen, typewriter, word processor—for getting our thoughts on paper. It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organ

William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

we write to discover what we know and don’t know; that we write more comfortably if we go exploring, free of the fear of not being on the “right” road to the right destination, and that we learn more if we feel that the work has a purpose.

William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

Students often feel guilty about modeling their writing on someone else’s writing. They think it’s unethical—which is commendable. Or they’re afraid they’ll lose their own identity. The point, however, is that we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become. But nobody

William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly—about any subject at all.

William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

an act of writing is an act of thinking—an organic compound, as the chemists would say. There’s little point in having a teacher clean up the messy syntax in a chemistry paper if he can’t also clean up the messy chemistry. The indivisibility of language is what gives writing its authority and its majesty.