William Zinsser’s On Writing Well has been on my shelf for more than four years. It was one book that someone asked me to read when I started taking an interest in writing. So, in the last few months, soon after my morning runs, I would open Zinsser and read just one chapter from it. Almost every week, I made just enough progress—one page at a time, one sentence at once. And it was just yesterday; I completed reading Zinsser wholly.
Zinsser always wanted to be a newspaperman. And so, when he finally got a chance to start his career as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, he knew that he would write all his life. Over the years, he has had the opportunity not just to write but also to teach writing. He taught writing at Yale and the New School.
William Zinsser also wrote a book on writing, titled On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, which sold more than a million copies. In selling like hot cakes, the book taught many writers to hone their skills. James Kilpatrick once remarked that if he were to pick just one book on writing, it would no doubt be Zinsser’s On Writing Well.
Zinsser calls his book a ‘craft book’ because the rules of English haven’t changed wholly in a long time. The book is divided into four parts: principles, methods, forms, and attitudes. In discussing some principles of writing, Zinsser gives a masterclass on simplicity. He notes that clutter is a ‘disease’ in most writings. As a society, we use unnecessary words and meaningless jargon.
But the secret to good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already a 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.
For instance, instead of at ‘the present time’ or ‘presently’, one might just write ‘now’. Similarly, ‘assistance’ with ‘help’, or ‘numerous’ with ‘many’, or ‘facilitate’ with ‘ease’, etc. Just as Thoreau would have said, Zinsser notes: ‘Simplify, simplify.’ Clarity is a key to effective writing. It is a two-way street. Clear writing is clear thinking; clear thinking is clear writing.
For a nonfiction writer, it is always important to ask: ‘What am I trying to say?’ And to one’s surprise, most people aren’t really sure what they want to say. It is not easy to think clearly. It takes patience, discipline, and considerable practice to think clearly. But once one has honed the skill of clear thinking, one is a step closer to writing well.
Every first draft must be revised. As a writer, you should write what you have written. And rewrite it again and again, just so that it sounds perfect when you read it aloud. And when you encounter words and sentences you could do away with, do yourself a favour and do your reader a favour and cut them out. (I have often struggled to read and revise my writing! Over time, with a little dose of Zinsser, I hope to be able to read, revise, and cut out my writing for clarity.)
When editing your text, you could bracket phrases that you think could be replaced or done away with. Remove the adjectives and adverbs. And in essence, try simplifying.
Then, focus on style. Those writers who write in the first-person narrative are natural. Writing, Zinsser tells us, ‘is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.’ Therefore, Zinsser adds, writers must learn to write in the first person.
Honing the techniques of style leads us to its consumers: the audience. Sloppy writing tends to lose the audience, while good writing earns more of them. Therefore, a writer must write in a way that their audience does not doze off halfway through the text. Keep writing simple, write short sentences, write them in the first person, and cut out all the excess in your writing.
Writing good prose requires specific techniques and methods.
Unity is a crucial element to all writing. Are you writing in a first-person narrative throughout? Are you using the past tense throughout? And are you involved with your subject or wholly detached from it? To write is to maintain a coherent structure which is followed throughout. Such a structure not only introduces elegance to writing but also makes the text readable and free from confusion.
The Lead and the Ending are the most important sentences of your text. If the first sentence or the first few sentences do not induce the reader to go on, then the audience will just lose track of your text. The lead in a text should ‘capture the reader immediately and force [them] to keep reading. It must cajole [them] with freshness or novelty, or paradox, or humour, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question.’
With a strong lead, the writer must continue to build their story. Add more details. Tell things that the reader does not already know. Tell them well. Collect more materials on a story than you could ever use. And look for materials everywhere. Try to write your essay like a story. Narratives tend to hold one’s attention, and ‘everybody wants to be told a story’. Always write your stories in narrative style. Look, for instance, at the Holy Bible, which opens up like this: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth.’ It makes the reader curious to read the next sentence.
And just like a good lead, the writer must learn to know where to end the essay. Most often, the stories we tell have their own ending. At other times, we would just have to know where to stop. But one way to think of the ending to an essay is to see if it has reached its finality. Use quotes from your notes to circle back to your story, and find something funny, something unexpected, and something curious to reach an end to your essay. In sum, surprise your readers.
One of the chapters I liked most in Zinsser’s On Writing Well is ‘Bits & Pieces’, which contains a great deal of advice on how to write well. Here, Zinsser tells us to use active verbs instead of passive verbs. Say, ‘Joe saw him’, instead of ‘he was seen by Joe’. Cut almost all adverbs. Cut also all adjectives. Prune out as many qualifiers as you can. They dilute your style. Use proper punctuation. The Period, reach it as early as you can. The exclamation point, don’t use it unless you must. Use a semicolon when you think you can.
Use Em Dashes and En Dashes as well as you can. But use them to either amplify something in the sentence or justify something based on the first sentence. Use mood changers—but, however, yet, now, later, instead, therefore, etc.—to alert the reader of the change in mood. Know where to use ‘that’ and where to use ‘which’. Which always follows after a comma. Keep sentences short. Paragraphs shorter. Review your text—read it aloud and rewrite.
In the third part on writing forms, Zinsser introduces us to various forms of writing, including travel writing, business writing, science writing, sports writing, memoirs, and writing about family. In his advice for people writing about places, Zinsser tells us that one must always look for things that others may not have experienced. At times, it is helpful for writers to observe their surroundings. How the space is organised, who inhabits it, and what it represents. Isolate qualities that make the place distinctive. Contrast what we know about a place with what might be the reality.
For those writing a memoir, Zinsser tells, ‘Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction. Thoreau wrote seven different drafts of Walden in eight years; no American memoir was more painstakingly pieced together. To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organising idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth’.
To write well, Zinsser tells us, one must focus on their voice. There is no such thing as an effortless style. So, read good books. And always imitate another writer. ‘Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft.’ So, find the best writers you can copy. Get their voice and taste in your ear, and very soon, your voice and your identity hone out of it. Enjoy the process of writing. If writing is all that you hope to do, then learn to enjoy it as well as you can. Listen to your editors. But learn to differentiate between good advice and bad advice. And experiment.