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On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, Seventh Edition, by William Zinsser. New York: Harper Perennial, 2016. 336 pp. $10.07 (paperback).
William Zinsser’s On Writing Well is an outstanding guide for anyone who writes nonfiction. Whether you write emails or op-eds, family histories or scientific papers, reading and integrating Zinsser’s Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction is sure to prove of immense value.
William Zinsser (1922–2015) began his writing career as a journalist at the New York Herald Tribune at the age of twenty-four. He made his living as a writer and editor, contributing to scores of well-known publications before going on to teach writing at Yale University, as well as The New School and Columbia University. First published in 1976, On Writing Well (one of Zinsser’s eighteen books) is now in its seventh edition and has sold more than one million copies.
Though the book’s four sections—Principles, Methods, Forms, and Attitudes—might seem to forecast a disjointed, academic tome, Zinsser’s book is in fact a lilting, entertaining narrative crafted to deliver the penetrating insights of a man who devoted his life to writing well and teaching others the art.
Zinsser says, “Writers are obviously at their most natural when they write in the first person,” and he acts on this observation, telling stories from his career as a writer and teacher to illustrate the principles of prose (20).
Along the way, Zinsser calls attention to common pitfalls. “Clutter is the disease of American writing,” he says (6).
We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. . . . Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. . . . 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 construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. (6–7)
Zinsser champions strict word economy. He warns, “The man or woman snoozing in a chair with a magazine or a book is a person who was...