10. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction - William Zinsser

I. Principles:
-Having individuality/humanity and warmth
-"Writing is talking to someone else on paper. If you can think clearly, you can put what you think and what you know into writing." p.x
-"of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength." p.6

-Simplicity (avoid clutter)
-"Clear thinking becomes clear writing" p.9
-"If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't been careful enough...." an excessively cluttered sentence, shoddily constructed, 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 is not a logical sequel to Sentence A; the writer, in whose head the connection is clear, hasn't bothered to provide the missing link. has used a word incorrectly.
-"Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don't know. Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time? If it's not, some fuzz has worked its way into the machinery. The clear writer is someone clearheaded enough to see this stuff for what it is: fuzz." p.12

Style: Firm conviction, sell yourself.
The audience: "You are writing for yourself."

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. The English language is rich in strong and supple words." p.33
-don't use dreary words, care deeply about words. "The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original." p.35 the habit of using dictionaries
-considerations of sound and rhythm should be woven through everything you write. ...read everything aloud... You'll begin to hear where the trouble lies. See if you can gain variety by reversing the order of a sentence, or by substituting a word that has freshness or oddity, or by altering the length of your sentences so they don't all sound as if they came out of the same mold. An occasional short sentence can carry a tremendous punch. It stays in the reader's ear." p.37 Use words with originality and care.

II. Methods
1. Unity is the anchor of good writing.
-Unity of pronoun. Are you going to write in the first person, as a participant, or in the third person, as an observer?
-Unity of tense. choose the tense in which you are principally going to address the reader, no matter how many glances you may take backward or forward along the way.
-Unity of mood. casual voice or with a certain formality. Don't mix
-Think small. Decide what corner of your subject you're going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop. Enthusiasm in writing keeps you going.

2. The Lead and the Ending
-"The lead must cajole the reader with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humour, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question.
Next the lead must do some real work. It must provide hard details that tell the reader why the piece was written and why he ought to read it. ... Continue to build. Every paragraph should amplify the one that preceded it. Give more thought to adding solid detail and less to entertaining the reader. But take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph--it's the crucial springboard to the next paragraph." p. 56
-Look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people. ...some odd fact the writer was able to discover.
-Another approach is to just tell a story. ... Sometimes you can tell your whole story in the first sentence.
-Ending: "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. Often it takes just a few sentences to wrap things up. Ideally they should encapsulate the idea of the piece and conclude with a sentence that jolts us with its fitness or unexpectedness." p.66 or "to bring the story full circle--to strike at the end an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning. or "a quotation"

3. Bits & Pieces:
-Verbs: use active verbs (clarity and vigour) unless there is no comfortable way to get around using a passive verb. "Make active verbs activate your sentences, and try to avoid the kind that need an appended proposition to complete their work. Don't say that the president of the company stepped down. Did he resign? Did he retire? Did he get fired? Be precise. Use precise verbs." p.69
-Adverbs: Most adverbs are unnecessary. If you choose a verb that already has a specific meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning, it is bad. e.g. effortlessly easy X
-Adjectives: Most are also unnecessary.
-Little Qualifiers: 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," ... They dilute your style and your persuasiveness.
-Punctuation: The Period. Most writers don't reach it soon enough. If you want to write long sentences, make sure that the sentence is under control from beginning to end, in syntax and punctuation.
The Exclamation Point. Don't use it unless you must to achieve a certain effect. Instead, construct your sentence so that the order of the words will put the emphasis where you want it. Also resist using an exclamation point to notify the reader that you are making a joke or being ironic. ... Humor is best achieved by understatement.
The Dash: 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." It pushes the sentence ahead and explains why they kept going. The other use involves two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought (an explanatory detail) 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." p.73
Mood Changers: Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence. "but," "yet," "however," "nevertheless," "still," "instead," "thus," "therefore," "meanwhile," "now," "later," "today," "subsequently" and several more. These make it much easier for readers to process a sentence when you're shifting direction.
Contractions: I'll, won't, can't, warmer. I'dX
Concept nouns: avoid them-dead sentences. All the meaning lies in impersonal nouns that embody a vague concept: "reaction," "cynicism," "response," "hostility." Turn these cold sentences around. Get people doing things.
Creeping nounism: X
Overstatement: X
The quickest fix: delete a sentence
Keep paragraphs short. Writing is visual.
Rewriting: Most rewriting consists of reshaping and tightening and refining the raw material you wrote on your first try. Much of it consists of making sure you've given the reader a narrative flow he can follow with no trouble from beginning to end. Keep putting yourself in the reader's place. Is there something he should have been told early in the sentence that you put near the end? Does he know when he starts sentence B that you've made a shift--of subject, tense, tone, emphasis--from sentence A?" p. 85 altering the sequence, tightening the flow, sharpening the point...cadence, detail and freshness of language. ...always remembering where you left the reader in the previous sentence.
Read aloud. ..make an arrangement--one that holds together from start to finish and that moves with economy and warmth. The tidying process.
-Trust your material. "What people do--and what people say--continues to take me by surprise with its wonderfulness, or its quirkiness, or its drama, or its humor, or its pain. Who could invent all the astonishing things that really happen?" p.89

III. Forms
1. Nonfiction as literature: include all the writers who come bearing information and who present it with vigour, clarity and humanity.
"Motivation is at the heart of writing." p.99

2. Writing About People--The Interview: "Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does--in his own words. ...They carry the inflection of his speaking voice and the idiosyncrasies of how he puts a sentence together. They contain the regionalisms of his conversation and the lingo of his trade. They convey his enthusiasms." p.100
"....will come alive in proportion to the number of 'quotes' you can weave into it as you go along. .... look for the human element." p. 101
-"...the kind of information that is locked inside people's heads, which a good nonfiction writer must unlock."
-How? First, decide what person you want to interview. Someone who touches some corner of the reader's life.
-Writing the interview: brevity and fair play. To present his position accurately. To the reader-presnet it in the tightest package. quotes: "selecting, rejecting, thinning, transposing their order, saving a good one for the end."
-"Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand. As for how to organize the interview, the lead should obviously tell the reader why the person is worth reading about. What is his claim to our time or attention? Thereafter, try to achieve a balance between what the subject is saying in his words and what you are writing in your words." p.110
-E.g. "I usually like to go downtown once a week," Mr. Smith said, "and have lunch with some of my old friends." He pointed out, explained, replied, added.

3. Writing About Places--The Travel Article
-"you'll need to evoke the mood of a whole neighbourhood or town to give texture to the story you're telling. ...descriptive detail will be the main substance." p.116
-We don't want all info. What made his trip different from everybody else's? What can he tell us that we don't already know?
-"As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self--the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells--and keep an objective eye on the reader. ...The detail must be significant."
-Dont' use travelese/cliche. Style and substance.  First, choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion...make a special effort not to use them. Also resist straining for the luminous lyrical phrase to describe the wondrous waterfall. Strive for fresh words and images. Substance: be intensely selective. Find details that are significant. They may be important to your narrative; they may be unusual, or colourful, or comic, or entertaining. But make sure they do useful work.
-to find the central idea of the place you're dealing with.
-"the article that's less notable for what a writer extracts from a place than for what the place extracts from him. ...It should generate a whole constellation of ideas about how men and women work and play, raise their children, worship their gods, live and die." p. 128
-"what brings a place alive is human activity: people doing the things that give a locale its character." "There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicoloured, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord."--excerpt from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time p.129
-To enter into the intention of each place: to find out what it was trying to be, not what I might have expected or wanted it to be." p.130

4. Writing About Yourself--The Memoir
"Make sure every component in your memoir is doing useful work. Write about yourself, by all means, with confidence and with pleasure. But see that all the details--people, places, events, anecdotes, ideas, emotions--are moving your story steadily along." p.135
No other form goes to the roots of personal experience---to all the drama and pain and humor and unexpectedness of life.
-What gives them their power is the narrowness of their focus. p.136 (for a list of good memoirs to read).
-"One secret of the art is detail. Any kind of detail will work--a sound or a smell or a song title--as long as it played a shaping role in the portion of your life you have chosen to distil. Consider sound." p. 137

5. Science and Technology
-form a linear sequence. Fact and deduction are the ruling family.
-Assume that your readers don't know what you assume everybody knows. An upside-down pyramid model. "Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more. The second sentence broadens what was stated first, making the pyramid wider, and the third broadens the second, so that you can gradually move beyond fact into significance and speculation--how a new discovery alters what was known, what new avenues of research it might open, where the research might be applied." p.150

6. Business Writing-
dejargonised, humanity

7. Sports

8. Writing About the Arts--Critics and Columnists
-distinction between a "critic" and a "reviewer."
Crticis should like--or, better still, love--the medium they are reviewing. Don't give away too much of the plot. Use specific detail e.g. citing a few examples and let your readers weigh them on their own fascination scale. Quote a few sentences in book review. avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver. Good criticism needs a lean and vivid style to express what you observed and what you think. ...
-Criticism is a serious intellectual act. steep yourself in the literature of the medium you hope to make your specialty.
-"Movies are intertwined with our daily lives and attitudes, our memories and myths." p.199
-"Critics should be among the first to notify us when the truths we hold to be self-evident cease to be true." p.202
-How should a good piece of criticism start? You must make an immediate effort to orient your readers to the special world they are about to enter.
-consist of personal opinion. ...to express your opinion firmly.

9. Humour
-Humour is often writers' best tool--and sometimes their only tool--for making an important point. p.208
-Control is vital to humour.

IV. Attitudes
1. The Sound of Your Voice:
-"Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that's enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and cliches.
-Effortless style at its best: a methodical act of composition that disarms us with its generated warmth.
-Freshness is crucial. Taste chooses words that have surprise, strength and precision.
-Find the best writers in the fields that interest you and read their work aloud. Get their voice and their taste into your ear--their attitude toward language. ... By reading other writers you also plug yourself into a longer tradition that enriches you. Sometimes you will tap a vein of eloquence or racial memory that gives your writing a depth it could never attain on its own.

2. Enjoyment, Fear and Confidence

3. The Tyranny of the Final Product
-focus on the process of choosing what you want to write about. Matters of shape, structure, compression, focus and intention.

4. A Writer's Decisions
-how to organise the paragraphs.
-"Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it." p.285

5. Write as Well as You Can
-analogy: his dad's shellac company--best quality.
-and write as entertainingly as possible.
-defend what you've written
-r/s between a writer and an editor should be one of negotiation and trust.

12- 18 Jan, 2017
sixth edition--revised and updated
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998

More: find reading list from the many good writers Zinsser has suggested in this book.