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
Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content; the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.)
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Meaning is remarkably elusive. After a lifetime of writing I still revise every sentence many times and still worry that I haven’t caught every ambiguity; I don’t want anyone to have to read a sentence of mine twice to find out what it means.
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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J. B. Jackson—books such as The Necessity of Ruins and The Vernacular Landscape.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
“I want them to go first to the literature, so they know how the experiment has been done before and what to expect in the lab and how to plan their work. Having to plan their work helps them to write it up as they go along, so that writing becomes woven through the entire class and lab experience. If they fall into a pitfall they can explain how
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For a manifesto, that’s well above the acceptable limit in concept nouns, generalized ideas and passive verbs, and someone told Hayden it wouldn’t do. Rewriting it on the spot, he got personal and specific and created a classic: We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to
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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
“I want them to go first to the literature, so they know how the experiment has been done before and what to expect in the lab and how to plan their work. Having to plan their work helps them to write it up as they go along, so that writing becomes woven through the entire class and lab experience. If they fall into a pitfall they can explain how
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The way to begin is with imitation.