On Writing Well

Zinsser taught nonfiction writing at Yale and this is the course. The first principle is that the reader's attention is on loan and that most sentences are carrying passengers — the qualifier, the throat-clearing opener, the adverb doing a verb's job. He prints two pages of his own manuscript covered in his own deletions to make the point that this is work and not talent.

After the general chapters on clarity and voice come specific ones on the forms: the interview, the travel piece, the memoir, writing about science, writing about sport, writing about business. The advice is concrete throughout — how to start, how to stop, what a transition is actually for — and he is unusually good on the fact that a bad ending will lose readers who were with you the whole way.

The examples are dated in places and he says so in each revision. The core of it is not: write plainly, cut what does not earn its place, and remember that you are asking a stranger for their time. It is the book most often handed to someone who has just been told their writing is unclear.