Writing can help you understand who you are and your heritage.
You can write to leave a record of what you've done, thought, and felt.
The essence of writing is re-writing.
Use any method that helps you say what you want to say.
To write is to put part of yourself on paper.
The challenge is to find the real person behind the tension.
The product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about but who he or she is.
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next.
There's a tendency to inflate what we say and write in order to sound important.
Inflations usually occur in proportion to education and rank.
A simple sentence, it is assumed, must have something wrong with it.
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
Walden is a good example of a writer saying what is on his mind in a plain and simple way.
Clear thinking becomes clear writing. One can't exist without the other.
The man or woman snoozing in a chair with a magazine or a book is a person who was being given to much unnecessary trouble by the writer.
Writers must constantly ask: what am I trying to say?
Contrary to popular belief, good writing doesn't come naturally.
Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves (during the act of writing).
If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard.
Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
Examine every word you put on paper.
Beware of the long word that's no better than the short word.
Put brackets around every component of a piece of writing that isn't doing useful work.
Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author's voice.
Be grateful for everything you can throw away.
Simplify, simplify.
Few people realise how badly they write.
You have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up.
First, learn to hammer the nails, and if what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength.
Trying to add style is like adding a toupee.
Be yourself. Relax. Have confidence.
No rules, however, are harder to follow.
All writers have good days and bad days.
Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.
Use 'I' and 'we' and 'us'.
Who are you NOT to say what you think?
Nobody else thinks or feels in exactly the same way as you.
People will care what you have to say if you tell them something interesting and tell them in words that come naturally.
'One' is a boring guy. I want a professor with a passion for his subject to tell me why it fascinates HIM.
We have become a society fearful of revealing who we are.
The organisations that send us their brochures sounds remarkably alike, but surely they were founded and are still sustained by people with different dreams and visions.
Writing has deep psychological roots.
Americans (and Brits) are unwilling to go out on a limb.
In previous generations, our leaders told us where they stood and what they believed.
Leaders who bob and weave like aging boxers don't inspire confidence -- or deserve it. The same is true for writers.
Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal.
Believe in your own identity and your own opinions.
Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.
Write for yourself.
Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it.
If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in.
If you go about writing with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.
There's no excuse for losing readers through sloppy workmanship.
You are who you are, he is who he is, and either you'll get along or you won't.
First, work hard to master the tools.
Your chances of losing the reader will be smaller if you ground your sentences in solid principles.
Relax and say what you want to say.
Be yourself when you write.
Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation.
Put your passions and crotchets on paper without care for whether the reader will share them.
Good writing can be enjoyable to read even if it's about a subject you have absolutely no interest in.
Hold firm opinions and say what you think.
Write for yourself and don't give a damn what the reader might think.
Never be timid or evasive.
Reflecting on a passage from How to Survive in Your Native Land by James Herndon, Zinsser says, 'Any writer who uses ""ain't"" and ""tendentious"" in the same sentence, who quotes without using quotation marks, knows what he's doing.
Develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive.
Take the time to root around and find the ones you want.
Surprise readers with unusual words and oblique looks.
Care deeply about words.
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what was written by earlier masters.
Writing is learned by imitation.
Read the people who are doing the kind of writing you want to do and try to figure out how they did it.
Get in the habit of using dictionaries.
Be a word freak.
If you have any doubt of what a word means, look it up, learn its etymology, and notice what curious branches its original root has put forth.
Get yourself a dictionary of synonyms.
The thesaurus is a reminder of all the choices - and you should use it with gratitude.
Read The Elements of Style by E.B. White once a year.
If you try to rearrange any phrase that has survived for a century, you will struggle to recreate the poetic nature of the original.
If all your sentences move at the same plodding gait, which even you recognise as deadly but don't know how to cure, read them aloud.
See if you can gain variety by reversing the order of a sentence, or by substituting a word that has freshness or oddity, or by altering the length of your sentences so they don't all sound as if they came out of the same machine.
Words are the only tools you've got.
The Careful Writer by Theodore M. Bernstein is an excellent book.
The laws of usage are relative, bending with the taste of the lawmaker.
The spoken language is looser than the written language.
Today's spoken garbage may be tomorrow's written gold.
'Ongoing' is a jargon word whose main use is to raise morale.
'Prioritise' is jargon, a pompous verb that sounds more important than 'rank'.
'Bottom line' is good usage - a metaphor borrowed from the world of bookkeeping that conveys an image we can picture.
Use good words, if they already exist - which they almost always do - to express yourself clearly and simply to someone else.
You learn to write by writing.
The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to write a certain number of words on a regular basis.
You must choose the tense in which you are principally going to address the reader.
Any tone is acceptable, but don't mix two or three.
Writers who pursue every last fact will find themselves pursuing the rainbow and never settling down to write.
Nobody can write a book or article 'about' something.
Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write.
Decide what corner of your subject you're going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop.
An unwieldly writing task is a drain on your enthusiasm.
Every successful piece of non-fiction should leave the reader with one provovative thought that he or she didn't have before.
Decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.
The act of writing generates some cluster of thoughts or memories that you didn't anticipate.
The most important sentence in any article is the first one.
The lead is a progression of sentences, each tugging the reader forward until he is hooked.
Readers want to know - very soon - what's in it for them.
Anything lead do, as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve.
Every paragraph should amplify the one that preceded it.
Take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph - it's the crucial springboard to the next paragraph.
Make the reader smile and you've got him for at least one more paragraph.
Salvation often lies not in the writer's style but in some odd fact he or she was able to discover.
Always collect more material than you will use.
But at some point you must stop researching and start writing.
Look for your material everywhere - not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people.
Look at signs and billboards and all the junk written on the roadside.
Try to give your lead a freshness of perception or detail.
Narrative is the oldest and most compelling method of holding someone's attention.
Always look for ways to convey your information in narrative form.
Approach your subject in a manner that most naturally suits what you are writing and who you are.
Sometimes you can tell the whole story in the first sentence.
Knowing when to end an article is far more important than most writers realise.
An article that doesn't stop where it should stop becomes a drag and therefore a failure.
We were taught at school that every story should have a beginning (I), middle (II), and end (III). If you're going to write good non-fiction, you must wriggle out of III's dread grip.
You will know that you have arrived at III when you are about to repeat in compressed form what you have already said in detail.
A good last sentence, or last paragraph, is a joy in itself. It gives the reader a lift, and it lingers when the article is over.
The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right.
It's like the curtain scene in a theatrical comedy. You're in the middle of a scene (you think), when suddenly one of the actors says something funny, or outrageous, or epigrammatic, and the lights go out.
When you're ready to stop, stop.
Often it takes just a few sentences to wrap things up.
Ideally, encapsulate the idea of the piece and conclude with a sentence that jolts us with its fitness or unexpectedness.
Bring the story full circle - strike an echo of a note at the end that was sounded at the beginning.
What usually works best is a quotation.
Surprise is the most refreshing element in non-fiction writing.
Verbs push the sentence forward and give it momentum.
Use active verbs.
Active verbs help us visualise an activity.
Use precise verbs.
Of the 701 words in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, a marvel of economy in itself, 505 words are one syllable and 122 are words of two syllables.
William Shakespeare and the King James Bible are examples of how active verbs give vitality to the written word.
Most adverbs are unnecessary.
Most adjectives are also unnecessary.
The concept is already in the noun.
If you want to make a value judgement about daffodils, choose an adjective like 'garish'.
The adjective that exists solely to as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.
Make your adjectives do work that needs to be done.
Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw.
Good writing is lean and confident.
'Very' is a useful word to achieve emphasis, but far more often it's clutter.
Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
Most writers don't reach the period soon enough.
Break the long sentence into two short sentences, or even three.
Among good writers it is the short sentence that predominates.
If you want to write long sentences, be a genius.
The exclamation point has a gushy aura, the breathless excitement of a debutante commenting on an event that was exciting only to her: 'Daddy say I must have had too much champagne!'
Construct your sentence so that the order of the words will put the emphasis where you want it.