On Writing Well

Zinsser wrote a manual for non-fiction writing based on the course he taught at Yale, and it has been revised through seven editions. Its central instruction is that clear writing follows from clear thinking, and that the practical work is the removal of everything that does not do work.

The principles section covers simplicity, clutter, style, the audience, words and usage. Zinsser argues that most sentences contain words that serve no purpose, that qualifiers weaken rather than protect a statement, that the passive voice conceals who did what, and that jargon exists to signal membership rather than to communicate. He instructs writers to strip every sentence to its cleanest components and to distrust any construction that appeared easily.

The methods section covers unity of tense, person and mood; the lead, which must persuade the reader to continue and which he treats as the most important sentence; the ending, which should stop rather than summarise; the use of quotation; and the discipline of rewriting, which he says is where writing actually happens.

The forms section covers specific types including interviews, travel, memoir, science and technical writing, business writing, sport and criticism. The final section on attitudes covers voice, enjoyment and the argument that writers should write for themselves rather than for an imagined audience. The book is directed at general non-fiction and is less useful for technical or argumentative writing where structure matters more than sentence craft. Strunk and White covers the mechanics more compactly. Zinsser's advice on the lead, on cutting, and on rewriting as the actual work is what most readers take from it.