In On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, William Zinsser offers guidance for anyone who wants to improve their writing skills. While the book is most relevant to people whose day-to-day lives are based around writing (e.g., students, writers, and journalists), Zinsser thinks that anyone can learn to write effectively in any genre, as long as they’re willing to put in the necessary time and effort. He argues that all good writing shares a few common traits: it’s clear, it’s logically-structured, and most importantly, it tells people a story they want to hear. Usually, the most compelling stories connect with the reader on a human level: they’re relatable, funny, surprising, full of rich details, or at least entertaining to read. Therefore, the best writers know how to present a compelling persona or tell relatable stories about interesting people—preferably, both. Since all writing is based on a “personal transaction” between the writer and reader, Zinsser argues that writers should learn to focus on the human element in their stories and communicate their own humanity through their style.
Zinsser argues that there’s a “personal transaction” at the core of nonfiction writing, which means that the writer offers their voice and story in exchange for the reader’s time. In the first chapter of On Writing Well, Zinsser suggests that people become writers and readers for simple, complementary reasons. People write because they want to communicate some deep truth, knowledge, or experience. And people read to experience the emotions that good writing arouses in them: interest, surprise, delight, and so on. Therefore, the writer’s job is to use language as a bridge to make a personal and emotional connection with the reader. Because writing is so personal, Zinsser notes that it heavily depends on the individual writer’s psychology. Every writer has their own unique process and faces their own unique challenges. But all writers have to be vulnerable in order to “put some part of themselves on paper,” and they have to be tense when they sculpt their words into a polished product. Thus, the writer’s half of the transaction is always deeply personal: even when they’re writing about someone else, the writer has to dig into themselves in order to find a story worth telling. Put differently, writers have to find the “humanity and warmth” in their story, then figure out how to convey those qualities to the reader. This gives good writing the “aliveness that keeps the reader reading.” Therefore, for Zinsser, the personal transaction really means that a writer has to offer the reader soul, emotion, and humanity in order to connect with them.
The most important way for writers to capture humanity on the page is by finding the human element in their stories. Often, random quotes and unexpected details are the best sources of this richness and soul. For instance, Zinsser ends his article about Timbuktu by describing his random encounter with a generous Bedouin family in the Sahara Desert. He thinks that this meeting best captures his piece’s message about “the nobility of living on the edge.” In general, quotes, facts, and anecdotes capture the reader’s attention by helping them relate to other people’s lives. Zinsser also thinks that the best way to grab the reader’s attention is by faithfully portraying other people. This is why he believes that interviews are one of the most powerful genres of writing and defends always quoting other people instead of paraphrasing their thoughts. Readers prefer to learn about a living, breathing person through their own words. Thus, Zinsser always spices up boring topics by finding a human angle. For instance, in his pieces about the New York Public Library, the Sotheby’s auction house, and the Book-of-the-Month Club, Zinsser could have easily just recounted these institutions’ histories. But instead, he interviewed each institution’s leaders and based his writing on the “information that [was] locked inside people’s heads.” He reaffirms that to keep readers engaged, writers should reach for the human element in any story.
Writers can also add humanity to their work and connect to their readers by developing a distinctive voice. Zinsser thinks a writer’s best commodity—or their unique selling point—is their own voice. Nobody else can copy it, and it’s what makes their work worth reading. Put differently, “a writer is someone who asks us to travel with [them],” and readers prefer the travel companion with the best personality. A unique, authentic perspective is always a draw for readers. Zinsser’s tip for finding a distinctive style is to “be yourself.” Faking style won’t do—readers can see right through it. It can take years for writers to find their voices, and they can only do so by writing what they care about. For instance, the best measure of whether something is interesting, surprising, or funny enough to print is simply if the writer finds it interesting, surprising, or funny. But once they find their voice, Zinsser argues, their enthusiasm will hook their readers and bring them back for more. Zinsser admits that he often keeps reading about topics he doesn’t care about, simply because the writer’s enthusiasm is infectious. For instance, he adores E.B. White’s essay about hens, even though he thinks poultry is extraordinarily boring. This proves that a writer’s style alone can make a piece interesting.
For thousands of years, writers have had one deceptively simple job: “saying something that other people will want to read.” In Zinsser’s view, people will always want to read stories that inspire, surprise, and entertain them. In other words, readers want personality and humanity, whether those things come through a writer’s style or the content they explore.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Human Element ThemeTracker
The Human Element 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.
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. I often find myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would interest me—some scientific quest, perhaps. What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field. […]
This is the personal transaction that’s at the heart of good nonfiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important qualities that this book will go in search of: humanity and warmth. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it’s not a question of gimmicks to “personalize” the author. It’s a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.
Can such principles be taught? Maybe not. But most of them can be learned.
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.
There is no style store; style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it. Trying to add style is like adding a toupee. At first glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second glance—and with a toupee there’s always a second glance—he doesn’t look quite right. The problem is not that he doesn’t look well groomed; he does, and we can only admire the wigmaker’s skill. The point is that he doesn’t look like himself.
This is the problem of writers who set out deliberately to garnish their prose. You lose whatever it is that makes you unique. The reader will notice if you are putting on airs. Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.
[…] “Who am I writing for?”
It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person. Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.
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.
Therefore your lead must capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading. It must cajole him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humor, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question. Anything will do, as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve.
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.
Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does—in his own words.
His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land. 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. This is a person talking to the reader directly, not through the filter of a writer. As soon as a writer steps in, everyone else’s experience becomes secondhand.
What’s wrong, I believe, is to fabricate quotes or to surmise what someone might have said. Writing is a public trust. The nonfiction writer’s rare privilege is to have the whole wonderful world of real people to write about. When you get people talking, handle what they say as you would handle a valuable gift.
Think narrow, then, when you try the form. Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction.
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.
My commodity as a writer, whatever I’m writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don’t alter your voice to fit your subject. 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 clichés.
“The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good. […] Even if he isn’t.”
Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s almost the whole point of becoming a writer. I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education. If you write about subjects you think you would enjoy knowing about, your enjoyment will show in what you write. Learning is a tonic.
If you master the tools of the trade—the fundamentals of interviewing and of orderly construction—and if you bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your humanity, you can write about any subject. That’s your ticket to an interesting life.
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.
That’s a highly specialized subject for a piece of writing; not many people owned a mechanical baseball game. But everybody had a favorite childhood toy or game or doll. The fact that I had such a toy, and that it was brought back to me at the other end of my life, can’t help connecting with readers who would like to hold their favorite toy or game or doll one more time. They don’t identify with my baseball game; they identify with the idea of the game—a universal idea. Remember this when you write your memoir and worry that your story isn’t big enough to interest anyone else. The small stories that still stick in your memory have a resonance of their own. Trust them.
I’ve always felt that my “style”—the careful projection onto paper of who I think I am—is my main marketable asset, the one possession that might set me apart from other writers. Therefore I’ve never wanted anyone to tinker with it, and after I submit an article I protect it fiercely. Several magazine editors have told me I’m the only writer they know who cares what happens to his piece after he gets paid for it.
My favorite definition of a careful writer comes from Joe DiMaggio, though he didn’t know that’s what he was defining. DiMaggio was the greatest player I ever saw, and nobody looked more relaxed. He covered vast distances in the outfield, moving in graceful strides, always arriving ahead of the ball, making the hardest catch look routine, and even when he was at bat, hitting the ball with tremendous power, he didn’t appear to be exerting himself. I marveled at how effortless he looked because what he did could only be achieved by great daily effort. A reporter once asked him how he managed to play so well so consistently, and he said: “I always thought that there was at least one person in the stands who had never seen me play, and I didn’t want to let him down.”
