William Zinsser
There's no subject you don't have permission to write about. Students often avoid subjects close to their heart ... because they assume that their teachers will regard those topics as 'stupid.' No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.Collection: Teacher
Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.Collection: Reading
My commodity as a writer, whatever I'm writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don't alter your voice to fit the 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.Collection: Writing
The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.Collection: Jobs
Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.Collection: Principles
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.Collection: Writing
Good writers are visible just behind their words.Collection: Writing
Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Writing
Every time you look at a blank piece of paper, you're doing something new. You have to step onto that blank territory and remind yourself the sky didn't fall in the last time you wrote. Writing is a question of overcoming your fears-and everybody has them.Collection: Fall
There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.Collection: Writing
Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five - just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.Collection: Successful
Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.Collection: Being Yourself
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.Collection: Interesting
A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.Collection: Writing
Writing is a craft not an art.Collection: Inspirational
Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.Collection: Life
The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.Collection: Writing
I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.Collection: Thinking
Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.Collection: Anything Goes
All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Country
But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.Collection: Jobs
Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.Collection: Strong
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.Collection: Reading
Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.Collection: Eloquence
Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.Collection: Writing
Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.Collection: Errors
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.Collection: Mistake
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead.Collection: Important