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

That’s a wonderful sentence. The words are refreshingly short; they instantly appeal to the eye and make us want to read them. More important, all the nouns are working nouns: they denote objects (bread) or activities (race, battle) or attainments (riches, favor) or conditions of fate (time, chance) that we can relate to our own lives.

when I was in Italy during World War II, the first time I got a few days off I hitchhiked to Rome to see the Forum, though the distance was great and the hours I could spend there were short.

Information is your sacred product, and noise is its pollutant. Guard the message with your life.

The way to begin is with imitation.

Another is that the essence of writing is rewriting. Very few writers say on their first try exactly what they want to say.

we write to find out what we know and what we want to say.

Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the tendency of energy is to decay in usefulness—a change for the worse known as entropy. I found it consoling after all these years to learn that writers are up against nothing less than the fundamental anarchy of the universe; entropy, prince of disorder, is sprinkling noise on everything we write.

all the writers represented in Part II wrote clearly because the act of writing and rewriting made them think clearly, organized their ideas, told them what they knew and what they still needed to know, and pushed them to new areas of knowledge. It can do the same for you.

this is a book about process: the process of transmitting information clearly and simply. Only by repeated applications of process—writing and rewriting and pruning and shaping—can we hammer out a clear and simple product.