Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
William Zinsseramazon.com
Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
It was drafted by Tom Hayden, whose first version began like this: Every generation inherits from the past a set of problems—and a dominant set of insights and perspectives by which the problems are to be understood and, hopefully, managed.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
One of them asked him what it took to be a humor writer. “Comic writing,” he said, “needs audacity and exuberance and gaiety—and the most important of these is audacity.” Then he said: “The reader has to believe that the writer is feeling good.” The sentence hit with me tremendous force, especially when he added, almost as an afterthought, “even if
... See moreWilliam Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
the common thread is a sense of high enjoyment, zest and wonder. Perhaps, both in learning to write and in writing to learn, they are the only ingredients that really matter.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Another powerful element in learning to write is motivation. Motivation is crucial to writing—students will write far more willingly if they write about subjects that interest them and that they have an aptitude for. But they don’t often get that chance; writing tends to be assigned only in subjects like English or history that are identified with
... See moreWilliam Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Writing is a craft, and a writer is someone who goes to work every day with his tools, like the carpenter or the television repairman, no matter how he feels, and if one of the things he wants to produce by 6 P.M. is a sense of enjoyment in his writing, he must generate it by an act of will. Nobody else is going to do it for him.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
me to get on with my life. Learning, he seemed to be saying, takes a multitude of forms; expect to find them in places
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
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?
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
what I first needed to know more about was how writing was related to learning. How much do we learn about a subject through writing that we wouldn’t learn in any other way?
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Memory and intuition and chance associations will always generate a certain percentage of what any writer writes. The remainder is generated by reason.