Throughout On Writing Well, William Zinsser repeats one piece of advice more than any other: be clear, direct, and precise. Inexperienced writers tend to think that they’ll sound intelligent if they use complicated language, but Zinsser believes that this is wrong. With very few exceptions, the best writers use as few words as possible and try to say exactly what they mean. They stick to plain English, no matter their job or field of expertise. Zinsser argues that simplicity is the key to effective writing because it’s the only way to keep the reader’s attention and make a deep impression on them.
Zinsser tells aspiring writers to avoid the cluttered style that’s common in business, government, academia, and journalism. Clutter is confusing, unpersuasive, and unlikely to hold a reader’s attention. Jargon, vagueness, and unnecessary words all make writing cluttered. First, bad writers use jargon and long words instead of common, short words. For instance, the word “help” is perfectly fine, but many people ask for “assistance” instead. They want to “dialogue” with “individuals” instead of just talking to people. In these cases, there’s no benefit to choosing the longer words. The writer might expect to sound smarter, but they actually end up sounding confused.
Next, bad writers use vague language to confuse others or avoid blame. For instance, companies use it to avoid taking responsibility for their errors, and politicians use it to avoid committing to policy change. Vague language lets people pretend to say something when they’re really saying nothing at all. This is the opposite of good writing, which requires clearly communicating a specific idea. Journalists, travel writers, and sportswriters tend to choose vague language because they’re lazy or overworked: they use common terms, clichés, and metaphors without paying attention to their exact meaning. This makes for confusing and uninspiring writing.
Finally, bad writers use unnecessary words. For instance, they say “a personal friend of mine” instead of “my friend,” they tack qualifiers like “it is interesting to note” onto half of their sentences, or they use redundant adjectives (such as “yellow daffodil”). By adding more words without adding new meaning, these writers lose their readers’ attention, interest, and goodwill.
By contrast, effective writers choose simplicity, clarity, and efficiency over clutter. Where bad writers hide behind jargon, good writers choose the simplest word that achieves their purpose. Their makes reading their work easier and more enjoyable. Where bad writers are vague, good writers are precise—they use active verbs and vivid adjectives. In fact, Zinsser says, they tend to obsessively look for the best possible word and eliminate ambiguous phrasing.
Where bad writers clutter their writing with unnecessary words, good writers make sure that every word counts. They care about how their sentences sound, and they always look for shorter, more elegant ways to make their point because they value the reader’s time and attention. All writers are also readers, so they intuitively know that the same story is simply more pleasurable to read in plain English than in the “modern bureaucratic fuzz” that most people write nowadays. To emphasize this point, Zinsser remembers how the writer George Orwell once rewrote a famous Bible verse from Ecclesiastes in bureaucrat-speak. The original starts, “I returned and saw under the sun […]” while the cluttered version starts, “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that […]” Clutter ruins the story, while plain English lets it shine through.
Fortunately, even the most cluttered and confused writers can improve. In one of his workshops, Zinsser even taught school administrators to “dejargonize” their writing. The key to writing clean, effective prose is just to revise, rewrite, and practice. First drafts are usually messy, but revisions will seldom make them worse. In fact, this is the key to writing in general. Zinsser argues that writing is deceptively simple—it just requires paper and a writing implement—but it actually takes a lifetime of hard work to write well. The best writers are constantly practicing, rewriting, and imitating their models. For instance, Zinsser has tried to emulate E.B. White’s simple, breezy style all his life. Seven decades in, he admits that he still has a ways to go. Writing with ease and grace is difficult—it’s much harder than writing “bureaucratic fuzz.” But for Zinsser, anyone who takes themselves seriously as a writer should strive for clarity and simplicity.
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Simplicity vs. Clutter ThemeTracker
Simplicity vs. Clutter Quotes in On Writing Well
One of the pictures hanging in my office in mid-Manhattan is a photograph of the writer E. B. White. It was taken by Jill Krementz when White was 77 years old, at his home in North Brooklin, Maine. A white-haired man is sitting on a plain wooden bench at a plain wooden table—three boards nailed to four legs—in a small boathouse. The window is open to a view across the water. White is typing on a manual typewriter, and the only other objects are an ashtray and a nail keg. The keg, I don’t have to be told, is his wastebasket.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the 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. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.
Beware, then, of the long word that’s no better than the short word: “assistance” (help), “numerous” (many), “facilitate” (ease), “individual” (man or woman), “remainder” (rest), “initial” (first), “implement” (do), “sufficient” (enough), “attempt” (try), “referred to as” (called) and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write. Don’t dialogue with someone you can talk to. Don’t interface with anybody.
Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style and how it obstructs what they are trying to say. If you give me an eight-page article and I tell you to cut it to four pages, you’ll howl and say it can’t be done. Then you’ll go home and do it, and it will be much better. After that comes the hard part: cutting it to three.
The point is that 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. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I’d say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it. But cultivate the best models. Don’t assume that because an article is in a newspaper or a magazine it must be good.
Verbs are the most important of all your tools. They push the sentence forward and give it momentum. Active verbs push hard; passive verbs tug fitfully. Active verbs also enable us to visualize an activity because they require a pronoun (“he”), or a noun (“the boy”), or a person (“Mrs. Scott”) to put them in motion. Many verbs also carry in their imagery or in their sound a suggestion of what they mean: glitter, dazzle, twirl, beguile, scatter, swagger, poke, pamper, vex. Probably no other language has such a vast supply of verbs so bright with color. Don’t choose one that is dull or merely serviceable. Make active verbs activate your sentences, and avoid the kind that need an appended preposition to complete their work. Don’t set up a business that you can start or launch. 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.
Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost.
What McPhee has done is to capture the idea of Juneau and Anchorage. Your main task as a travel writer is to find the central idea of the place you’re dealing with.
For the principle of scientific and technical writing applies to all nonfiction writing. It’s the principle of leading readers who know nothing, step by step, to a grasp of subjects they didn’t think they had an aptitude for or were afraid they were too dumb to understand.
Any organization that won’t take the trouble to be both clear and personal in its writing will lose friends, customers and money. Let me put it another way for business executives: a shortfall will be experienced in anticipated profitability.
Something in Updike made contact with something in Williams: two solitary craftsmen laboring in the glare of the crowd. Look for this human bond. Remember that athletes are men and women who become part of our lives during the season, acting out our dreams or filling some other need for us, and we want that bond to be honored. Hold the hype and give us heroes who are believable.
Criticism is a serious intellectual act. It tries to evaluate serious works of art and to place them in the context of what has been done before in that medium or by that artist.
Humor is not a separate organism that can survive on its own frail metabolism. It’s a special angle of vision granted to certain writers who already write good English. They aren’t writing about life that’s essentially ludicrous; they are writing about life that’s essentially serious, but their eye falls on areas where serious hopes are mocked by some ironic turn of fate—“the strange incongruity,” as Stephen Leacock put it, “between our aspiration and our achievement.”
What struck me most powerfully when I got to Timbuktu was that the streets were of sand. I suddenly realized that sand is very different from dirt. Every town starts with dirt streets that eventually get paved as the inhabitants prosper and subdue their environment. But sand represents defeat. A city with streets of sand is a city at the edge.
At such moments I ask myself one very helpful question: “What is the piece really about?” (Not just “What is the piece about?”) Fondness for material you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to gather isn’t a good enough reason to include it if it’s not central to the story you’ve chosen to tell. Self-discipline bordering on masochism is required. The only consolation for the loss of so much material is that it isn’t totally lost; it remains in your writing as an intangible that the reader can sense. Readers should always feel that you know more about your subject than you’ve put in writing.
