As mentioned last week, I recently read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Although it's geared toward nonfiction writers, the fundamentals of good writing are covered and it's well worth a read even if you only do creative writing.
I wanted to share a selection of quotes that I found most useful. All of the below quotes come from the 30th Anniversary Kindle edition.
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.
If the reader is lost, it’s usually because the writer hasn’t been careful enough.
Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? ... Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it?
Is there any way to recognize clutter at a glance? Here’s a device my students at Yale found helpful. I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work.
You have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up.
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what was written by earlier masters. Writing is learned by imitation.
The most important sentence in any article is the first one.
Knowing when to end an article is far more important than most writers realize. You should give as much thought to choosing your last sentence as you did to your first.
Verbs are the most important of all your tools. They push the sentence forward and give it momentum.
Most adverbs are unnecessary. ... Most adjectives are also unnecessary. ... If it’s important to tell the reader that a house was drab or a girl was beautiful, by all means use “drab” and “beautiful.” They will have their proper power because you have learned to use adjectives sparsely.
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,” “pretty much,” “in a sense” and dozens more.
Don’t alter your voice to fit your subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognize.
Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good. But readers will stop reading you if they think you are talking down to them. Nobody wants to be patronized.
A writer with an ear for language will reach for fresh imagery and avoid phrases that are trite. The hack will reach for those very clichés, thinking he will enrich his thoughts with currency that is, as he would put it, tried and true.
Banality is the enemy of good writing; the challenge is to not write like everybody else.
But really, the whole thing is worth a read. Check it out!
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