I was never taught how to write. Like most people, I suppose, I just wrote. Despite degrees in English literature and journalism, I never had a class in creative writing. I had a certain facility, but mostly, I bumbled along, teaching myself.
At some point, I discovered William Strunk and E. B. White’s classic, The Elements of Style, and fell under the spell of their good sense and clear instructions. I followed their advice to emphasize verbs, choose the active voice over the passive, and, most important, “omit needless words.”
Soon after, I found On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser. Happy day! If Strunk and White were my avuncular, slightly old-fashioned guides, Zinsser was a wry graduate advisor, the kind of teacher you want to spend hours talking with at a coffee shop. Or pub.
In fact, Zinsser taught a popular writing class at Yale, and his talks there were the basis for On Writing Well. First published in 1976, the book has gone through numerous editions and sold more than 1.5 million copies.
A 2013 profile of Zinsser in The New York Times described the book’s impact:
In newsrooms, publishing houses, and wherever the labor centers on honing sentences and paragraphs, you are almost certain to find among the reference works a classic guide to nonfiction writing called “On Writing Well,” by Mr. Zinsser. Sometimes all you have to say is: Hand me the Zinsser.”
I have certainly reached for “the Zinsser” over the years of my own writing and teaching. His classic advice—“get rid of clutter,” “Beware…the long word that’s no better than the short word”—does not dim with time.
Zinsser wrote about usage, simplicity, unity—and he encouraged writers to be authentic and reveal themselves and their enthusiasms. From the personal transaction “at the heart of all good nonfiction,” he wrote, come two important qualities: humanity and warmth. “Good writing,” he said, has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it’s not a question of gimmicks…[but] a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.”
Not least, like the good writer he was, Zinsser doesn’t just tell—he shows. Two facing pages reproduce the final manuscript of his book, showing dozens of his editing marks, all in the service of making the writing tighter. And this was his fourth or fifth draft. Instructive and humbling.
Through his long career as a journalist, teacher, film critic, editor, and writer, Zinsser honed his own writing skills and coached countless others. Even at the age of 90, two years before his death, and blind from glaucoma, he continued to coach writers, the famous and not so famous. He listened as students read their work in progress, helping them “organize their thoughts by condensing, reducing—learning what not to include,” said The New York Times article.
Zinsser ended one chapter in On Writing Well with the rhetorical question—“Can [principles of writing] be taught?”
“Maybe not,” he answers his question. “But most of them can be learned.”
I keep learning. Hand me the Zinsser!
