On
Writing
Well
BOOKS BY WILLIAM ZINSSER
Any Old Place With You
Seen Any Good Movies Lately?
The City Dwellers
Weekend Guests
The Haircurl Papers
Pop Goes America
The Paradise Bit
The Lunacy Boom
On Writing Well
Writing With a Word Processor
Willie and Dwike
(republished as Mitchell and Ruff)
Writing to Learn
Spring Training
American Places
Speaking of Journalism
Easy to Remember
AUDIO BOOKS BY WILLIAM ZINSSER
On Writing Well
How to Write a Memoir
BOOKS EDITED BY WILLIAM ZINSSER
Extraordinary lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir
Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing
Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel
Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children
They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing
Going on Faith: Writing as a Spiritual Quest
On
Writing
Well
cssao
THE CLASSIC GUIDE TO
WRITING NONFICTION
25th Anniversary Edition
William Zinsser
Quill
A HarperResource Book
An Imprint of HzrperCollinsPublishers
ON WRITING WELL. Sixth Edition, revised and updated. Copyright © 1976, 1980,
1985, 1988, 1990, 1994, 1998, 2001 by William K. Zinsser. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or re-
produced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case
of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information ad-
dress HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promo-
tional use. For information, please write to: Special Markets Department, Harper-
Collins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
Designed by Alma Orenstein.
First HarperResource Quill edition published 2001.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zinsser, William Knowlton.
On writing well : the classic guide to writing nonfiction / William Zinsser. —
25th anniversary ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-06-000664-1
1. English language—Rhetoric. 2 . Exposition (Rhetoric) 3. Report writing.
I. Title.
PE1429 .Z5 2001
808'.042—dc21 2001041623
ISBN 0-06-000664-1 (pbk.)
02 03 04 05 •/RRD 109 8 7 65 4
C O N T E N T S
osso
INTRODUCTION
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
PART I Principles
The Transaction
Simplicity
Clutter
Style
The Audience
Words
Usage
PART II Methods
Unity
The Lead and the Ending
Bits & Pieces
PART ill Forms
Nonfiction as Literature
Writing About People: The Interview
Writing About Places: The Travel Article
Writing About Yourself: The Memoir
Science and Technology
Business Writing: Writing in Your Job
Sports
Writing About the Arts: Critics and Columnists
Humor
ix
3
7
13
18
25
33
38
49
55
68
95
100
116
133
148
166
179
194
208
viii CONTENTS
PART IV Attitudes
20 The Sound of Your Voice 233
2 1 Enjoyment, Fear and Confidence 243
22 The Tyranny of the Final Product 255
23 A Writer s Decisions 265
24 Write as Well as You Can 286
SOURCES 295
INDEX 301
INTRODUCTION
CSSQ
When I first wrote this book, in 1976, the readers I had in mind
were a relatively small segment of the population: students, writ-
ers, editors and people who wanted to learn to write. I wrote it on
a typewriter, the highest technology then available. I had no
inkling of the electronic marvels just around the corner that were
about to revolutionize the act of writing. First came the word
processor, in the 1980s, which made the computer an everyday
tool for people who had never thought of themselves as writers.
Then came the Internet and e-mail, in the 1990s, which com-
pleted the revolution. Today everybody in the world is writing to
everybody else, keeping in touch and doing business across every
border and time zone.
To me this is nothing less than a miracle, curing overnight what
appeared to be a deep American disorder. I've been repeatedly
told by people in nonwriting occupations—especially people in
science, technology, medicine, business and finance—that they
hate writing and can't write and don't want to be made to write.
One thing they particularly didn't want to write was letters.
Just getting started on a letter loomed as a chore with so many
formalities—Where's the stationery? Where's the envelope?
Where's the stamp?—that they would keep putting it off, and
when they finally did sit down to write they would spend the
entire first paragraph explaining why they hadn't written sooner.
x INTRODUCTION
In the second paragraph they would describe the weather in their
part of the country—a subject of no interest anywhere else. Only
in the third paragraph would they begin to relax and say what
they wanted to say.
Then along came e-mail and all the formalities went away.
E-mail has no etiquette. It doesn't require stationery, or neatness,
or proper spelling, or preliminary chitchat. E-mail writers are like
people who stop a friend on the sidewalk and say, "Did you see
the game last night?" WHAP! No amenities. They just start typ-
ing at full speed. So here's the miracle: All those people who said
they hate writing and can't write and don't want to write can write
and do want to write. In fact, they can't be turned off. Never have
so many Americans written so profusely and with so few inhibi-
tions. Which means that it wasn't a cognitive problem after all. It
was a cultural problem, rooted in that old bugaboo of American
education: fear.
Fear of writing gets planted in American schoolchildren at an
early age, especially children of scientific or technical or mechan-
ical bent. They are led to believe that writing is a special language
owned by the English teacher, available only to the humanistic
few who have "a gift for words." But writing isn't a skill that some
people are born with and others aren't, like a gift for art or music.
Writing is talking to someone else on paper. Anybody who can
think clearly can write clearly, about any subject at all. That has
always been the central premise of this book.
On one level, therefore, the new fluency created by e-mail is
terrific news. Any invention that eliminates the fear of writing is
up there with air conditioning and the lightbulb. But, as always,
there's a catch. Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the
essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with
ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.
That condition was first revealed in the 1980s, when people
began writing on word processors. Two opposite things hap-
pened. The word processor made good writers better and bad
INTRODUCTION xi
writers worse. Good writers know that very few sentences come
out right the first time, or even the third time or the fifth time.
For them the word processor was a rare gift, enabling them to
fuss endlessly with their sentences—cutting and revising and
reshaping—without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers
became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy
and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen. How could
such beautiful sentences not be perfect?
E-mail pushed that verbosity to a new extreme: chatter unlim-
ited. Its a spontaneous medium, not conducive to slowing down or
looking back. That makes it ideal for the never-ending upkeep of
personal life: maintaining contact with far-flung children and grand-
children and friends and long-lost classmates. If the writing is often
garrulous or disorganized or not quite clear, no real harm is done.
But e-mail is also where much of the world s business is now
conducted. Millions of e-mail messages every day give people the
information they need to do their job, and a badly written mes-
sage can cause a lot of damage. Employers have begun to realize
that they literally cannot afford to hire men and women who can't
write sentences that are tight and logical and clear. The new
information age, for all its high-tech gadgetry, is, finally, writing-
based. E-mail, the Internet and the fax are all forms of writing,
and writing is, finally, a craft, with its own set of tools, which are
words. Like all tools, they have to be used right.
On Writing Well is a craft book. That's what I set out to write
25 years ago—a book that would teach the craft of writing warmly
and clearly—and its principles have never changed; they are as
valid in the digital age as they were in the age of the typewriter. I
don't mean that the book itself hasn't changed. I've revised and
expanded it five times since 1976 to keep pace with new trends
in the language and in society: a far greater interest in memoir-
writing, for instance, and in writing about business and science
and sports, and in nonfiction writing by women and by newcom-
ers to the United States from other cultural traditions.
xii INTRODUCTION
I'm also not the same person I was 25 years ago. Books that
teach, if they have a long life, should reflect who the writer has
become at later stages of his own long life—what he has been
doing and thinking about. On Writing Well and I have grown
older and wiser together. In each of the five new editions the new
material consisted of things I had learned since the previous edi-
tion by continuing to wrestle with the craft as a writer. As a
teacher, I've become far more preoccupied with the intangibles
of the craft—the attitudes and values, like enjoyment and confi-
dence and intention, that keep us going and produce our best
work. But it wasn't until the sixth edition that I knew enough to
write the two chapters (21 and 22) that deal at proper length with
those attitudes and values.
Ultimately, however, good writing rests on craft and always
will. I don't know what still newer electronic marvels are waiting
just around the corner to make writing twice as easy and twice as
fast in the next 25 years. But I do know they won't make writing
twice as good. That will still require plain old hard work—clear
thinking—and the plain old tools of the English language.
William Zinsser
September 2001
P A R T I
-esee-
Principles
csao
The Transaction
A school in Connecticut once held "a day devoted to the arts,"
and I was asked if I would come and talk about writing as a
vocation. When I arrived I found that a second speaker had
been invited—Dr. Brock (as I'll call him), a surgeon who had
recently begun to write and had sold some stories to magazines.
He was going to talk about writing as an avocation. That made
us a panel, and we sat down to face a crowd of students and
teachers and parents, all eager to learn the secrets of our glam-
orous work.
Dr. Brock was dressed in a bright red jacket, looking vaguely
bohemian, as authors are supposed to look, and the first ques-
tion went to him. What was it like to be a writer?
He said it was tremendous fun. Coming home from an ardu-
ous day at the hospital, he would go straight to his yellow pad
and write his tensions away. The words just flowed. It was easy. I
then said that writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard
and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
Next Dr. Brock was asked if it was important to rewrite.
4 ON WRITING WELL
Absolutely not, he said. "Let it all hang out," he told us, and
whatever form the sentences take will reflect the writer at his
most natural. I then said that rewriting is the essence of writing.
I pointed out that professional writers rewrite their sentences
over and over and then rewrite what they have rewritten.
"What do you do on days when it isn't going well?" Dr. Brock
was asked. He said he just stopped writing and put the work
aside for a day when it would go better. I then said that the pro-
fessional writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. I
said that writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs
away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling him-
self. He is also going broke.
"What if you're feeling depressed or unhappy?" a student
asked. "Won't that affect your writing?"
Probably it will, Dr. Brock replied. Go fishing. Take a walk.
Probably it won't, I said. If your job is to write every day, you
learn to do it like any other job.
A student asked if we found it useful to circulate in the liter-
ary world. Dr. Brock said he was greatly enjoying his new life as
a man of letters, and he told several stories of being taken to
lunch by his publisher and his agent at Manhattan restaurants
where writers and editors gather. I said that professional writers
are solitary drudges who seldom see other writers.
"Do you put symbolism in your writing?" a student asked me.
"Not if I can help it," I replied. I have an unbroken record of
missing the deeper meaning in any story, play or movie, and as
for dance and mime, I have never had any idea of what is being
conveyed.
"I love symbols!" Dr. Brock exclaimed, and he described with
gusto the joys of weaving them through his work.
So the morning went, and it was a revelation to all of us. At
the end Dr. Brock told me he was enormously interested in my
answers—it had never occurred to him that writing could be
hard. I told him I was just as interested in his answers—it had
The Transaction 5
never occurred to me that writing could be easy. Maybe I should
take up surgery on the side.
As for the students, anyone might think we left them bewil-
dered. But in fact we gave them a broader glimpse of the writ-
ing process than if only one of us had talked. For there isn't any
"right" way to do such personal work. There are all kinds of
writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you
to say what you want to say is the right method for you. Some
people write by day, others by night. Some people need silence,
others turn on the radio. Some write by hand, some by word
processor, some by talking into a tape recorder. Some people
write their first draft in one long burst and then revise; others
can't write the second paragraph until they have fiddled end-
lessly with the first.
But all of them are vulnerable and all of them are tense.
They are driven by a compulsion to put some part of themselves
on paper, and yet they don't just write what comes naturally.
They sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who
emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to
write. The problem is to find the real man or woman behind the
tension.
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the
subject being written about, but who he or she is. I often find
myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would
interest me—some scientific quest, perhaps. What holds me is
the enthusiasm of the writer for his field. How was he drawn
into it? What emotional baggage did he bring along? How did it
change his life? It's not necessary to want to spend a year alone
at Walden Pond to become involved with a writer who did.
This is the personal transaction that's at the heart of good
nonfiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important
qualities that this book will go in search of: humanity and
warmth. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader
reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question
6 ON WRITING WELL
of gimmicks to "personalize" the author. It s a question of using
the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clar-
ity and strength.
Can such principles be taught? Maybe not. But most of them
can be learned.
osso
Simplicity
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society
strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous
frills and meaningless jargon.
Who can understand the clotted language of everyday Amer-
ican commerce: the memo, the corporation report, the business
letter, the notice from the bank explaining its latest "simplified"
statement? What member of an insurance or medical plan can
decipher the brochure explaining his costs and benefits? What
father or mother can put together a child's toy from the instruc-
tions on the box? Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby
sound important. The airline pilot who announces that he is
presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation
wouldn't think of saying it may rain. The sentence is too sim-
ple—there must be something wrong with it.
But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its
cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every
long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries
the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive con-
8 ON WRITING WELL
struction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—
these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the
strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to
education and rank.
During the 1960s the president of my university wrote a let-
ter to mollify the alumni after a spell of campus unrest. "You are
probably aware," he began, "that we have been experiencing
very considerable potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfac-
tion on issues only partially related." He meant that the students
had been hassling them about different things. I was far more
upset by the president s English than by the students' potentially
explosive expressions of dissatisfaction. I would have preferred
the presidential approach taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt when
he tried to convert into English his own governments memos,
such as this blackout order of 1942:
Such preparations shall be made as will completely
obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings
occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for
any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or
external illumination.
"Tell them," Roosevelt said, "that in buildings where they have
to keep the work going to put something across the windows."
Simplify, simplify. Thoreau said it, as we are so often
reminded, and no American writer more consistently practiced
what he preached. Open Walden to any page and you will find a
man saying in a plain and orderly way what is on his mind:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not
learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, dis-
cover that I had not lived.
Simplicity 9
How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from
clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear think-
ing becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other. It's
impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. He may
get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will
be lost, and there's no sin so grave, for the reader will not easily
be lured back.
Who is this elusive creature, the reader? The reader is some-
one with an attention span of about 30 seconds—a person assailed
by many forces competing for attention. At one time those forces
were relatively few: newspapers, magazines, radio, spouse, chil-
dren, pets. Today they also include a "home entertainment
center" (television, VCR, tapes, CDs), e-mail, the Internet, the
cellular phone, the fax machine, a fitness program, a pool, a lawn,
and that most potent of competitors, sleep. The man or woman
snoozing in a chair with a magazine or a book is a person who was
being given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer.
It won't do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to
keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usu-
ally because the writer hasn't been careful enough. That care-
lessness can take any number of forms. Perhaps a sentence is so
excessively cluttered that the reader, hacking through the ver-
biage, simply doesn't know what it means. Perhaps a sentence
has been so shoddily constructed that the reader could read it in
several ways. Perhaps the writer has switched pronouns in mid-
sentence, or has switched tenses, so the reader loses track of
who is talking or when the action took place. Perhaps Sentence
B i