# William Zinsser - On Writing Well (Highlights)  ## Metadata **Review**:: [readwise.io](https://readwise.io/bookreview/58494645) **Source**:: #from/readwise #from/kindle **Zettel**:: #zettel/fleeting **Status**:: #x **Authors**:: [[William Zinsser]] **Full Title**:: On Writing Well **Category**:: #books #readwise/books **Category Icon**:: 📚 **Highlighted**:: [[2026-02-22]] **Created**:: [[2026-03-02]] ## Highlights ### PART I Principles #### 2 Simplicity - But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. (Loc 173) ^990634143 - Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. (Loc 191) ^990634144 - Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves, as if they were working on any other project that requires logic: (Loc 211) ^990634145 #### 3 Clutter - “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” (Loc 266) ^990634147 - I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work. (Loc 285) ^990634148 - Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice. (Loc 291) ^990634149 #### 4 Style - I urge people to write in the first person: to use “I” and “me” and “we” and “us.” (Loc 351) ^990634151 - Good writers are visible just behind their words. If you aren’t allowed to use “I,” at least think “I” while you write, or write the first draft in the first person and then take the “I” s out. It will warm up your impersonal style. (Loc 373) ^990634152 #### 5 The Audience - You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. (Loc 400) ^990634154 Different from academic writing #### 6 Words - You’ll never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive. (Loc 510) ^990634156 - Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what was written by earlier masters. Writing is learned by imitation. (Loc 535) ^990634157 - Also bear in mind, when you’re choosing words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize. (Loc 554) ^990634158 - An occasional short sentence can carry a tremendous punch. It stays in the reader’s ear. (Loc 575) ^990634159 ### PART II Methods #### 8 Unity - What annoys us is that the writer never decided what kind of article he wanted to write or how he wanted to approach us. He comes at us in many guises, depending on what kind of material he is trying to purvey. Instead of controlling his material, his material is controlling him. (Loc 749) ^990634162 - “How much do I want to cover?” “What one point do I want to make?” (Loc 755) ^990634163 - Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write. (Loc 761) ^990634164 - Therefore think small. Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop. (Loc 762) ^990634165 - As for what point you want to make, every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have before. Not two thoughts, or five—just one. (Loc 765) ^990634166 - Trust your material if it’s taking you into terrain you didn’t intend to enter but where the vibrations are good. Adjust your style accordingly and proceed to whatever destination you reach. Don’t become the prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints. (Loc 775) ^990634167 #### 9 The Lead and the Ending - Your lead may not be the best of all possible leads, but if it does the job it’s supposed to do, be thankful and proceed. (Loc 791) ^990634169 - Therefore your lead must capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading. It must cajole him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humor, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question. Anything will do, as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve. (Loc 796) ^990634170 - One moral of this story is that you should always collect more material than you will use. Every article is strong in proportion to the surplus of details from which you can choose the few that will serve you best—if you don’t go on gathering facts forever. At some point you must stop researching and start writing. (Loc 848) ^990634171 - Another moral is to look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people. (Loc 850) ^990634172 - Always look for ways to convey your information in narrative form. (Loc 887) ^990634173 - For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit. (Loc 951) ^990634174 #### 10 Bits & Pieces - Make active verbs activate your sentences, and avoid the kind that need an appended preposition to complete their work. (Loc 996) ^990634176 - Again and again in careless writing, strong verbs are weakened by redundant adverbs. (Loc 1003) ^990634177 - The adjective that exists solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader. (Loc 1021) ^990634178 - Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: “a bit,” “a little,” “sort of,” “kind of,” “rather,” “quite,” “very,” “too,” “pretty much,” “in a sense” and dozens more. They dilute your style and your persuasiveness. (Loc 1026) ^990634179 - The large point is one of authority. Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader’s trust. 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. (Loc 1034) ^990634180 - Also resist using an exclamation point to notify the reader that you are making a joke or being ironic. (Loc 1049) ^990634181 - The dash is used in two ways. One is to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you stated in the first part. “We decided to keep going—it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner.” (Loc 1060) ^990634182 - The other use involves two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence. “She told me to get in the car—she had been after me all summer to have a haircut—and we drove silently into town.” (Loc 1063) ^990634183 - Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence. At least a dozen words will do this job for you: “but,” “yet,” “however,” “nevertheless,” “still,” “instead,” “thus,” “therefore,” “meanwhile,” “now,” “later,” “today,” “subsequently” and several more. (Loc 1070) ^990634184 - Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with “but.” If that’s what you learned, unlearn it—there’s no stronger word at the start. (Loc 1074) ^990634185 - If you need relief from too many sentences beginning with “but,” switch to “however.” (Loc 1076) ^990634186 - Don’t start a sentence with “however”—it hangs there like a wet dishrag. And don’t end with “however”—by that time it has lost its howeverness. (Loc 1077) ^990634187 - As for “meanwhile,” “now,” “today” and “later,” what they also save is confusion, for careless writers often change their time frame without remembering to tip the reader off. “Now I know better.” “Today you can’t find such an item.” “Later I found out why.” Always make sure your readers are oriented. Always ask yourself where you left them in the previous sentence. (Loc 1085) ^990634188 - Your style will be warmer and truer to your personality if you use contractions like “I’ll” and “won’t” and “can’t” when they fit comfortably into what you’re writing. (Loc 1089) ^990634189 - I only suggest avoiding one form—“ I’d,” “he’d,” “we’d,” etc.—because “I’d” can mean both “I had” and “I would,” and readers can get well into a sentence before learning which meaning it is. (Loc 1092) ^990634190 - Always use “that” unless it makes your meaning ambiguous. (Loc 1098) ^990634191 - If your sentence needs a comma to achieve its precise meaning, it probably needs “which.” “Which” serves a particular identifying function, different from “that.” (Loc 1102) ^990634192 - Nouns that express a concept are commonly used in bad writing instead of verbs that tell what somebody did. (Loc 1112) ^990634193 - Turn these cold sentences around. Get people doing things: (Loc 1118) ^990634194 - Surprisingly often a difficult problem in a sentence can be solved by simply getting rid of it. (Loc 1159) ^990634195 - One solution is to turn them into the plural: “All employees should decide what they think is best for them and their dependents.” But this is good only in small doses. A style that converts every “he” into a “they” will quickly turn to mush. (Loc 1206) ^990634196 - Another common solution is to use “or”: “Every employee should decide what he or she thinks is best for him or her.” But again, it should be used sparingly. (Loc 1208) ^990634197 - To turn every “he” into a “he or she,” and every “his” into a “his or her,” would clog the language. (Loc 1212) ^990634198 - (I reject “he/ she” altogether; the slant has no place in good English.) (Loc 1215) ^990634199 - I don’t like plurals; they weaken writing because they are less specific than the singular, less easy to visualize. (Loc 1218) ^990634200 - Instead of talking about what “the writer” does and the trouble he gets into, I found more places where I could address the writer directly (“ You’ll often find …”). (Loc 1228) ^990634201 - The tragic hero of the play is Othello. Small and malevolent, Iago feeds his jealous suspicions. (Loc 1282) ^990634202 If there is a transition in the new sentence, make it early nd clear. The example paragraph fails to deliver that the subject becomes another person in the second sentence. - I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. (Loc 1290) ^990634203 - Why didn’t you put that stuff in the lead?” The reporter would say, “Well, in the lead I was writing color.” The assumption is that fact and color are two separate ingredients. They’re not; color is organic to the fact. Your job is to present the colorful fact. (Loc 1319) ^990634204 - Don’t annoy your readers by over-explaining—by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like “surprisingly,” “predictably” and “of course,” which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material. (Loc 1349) ^990634205 ### PART III Forms #### 11 Nonfiction as Literature - Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood; and in Harper’s, which commissioned such remarkable pieces as Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. (Loc 1412) ^990634208 #rl #### 12 Writing About People: The Interview - Quotes are livelier when you break them up, making periodic appearances in your role as guide. (Loc 1593) ^990634210 - make your appearances useful; (Loc 1594) ^990634211 - When you use a quotation, start the sentence with it. Don’t lead up to it with a vapid phrase saying what the man said. (Loc 1597) ^990634212