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William Zinsser, Author of “On Writing Well”, Dies at 92
- muhfuhkuh 11y agoHe was the oracle of sound writing practice. I studied the example page[1] from his book with his hand-written edits like it was ancient cuneiform. Always the consummate perfectionist in the professional sense of the word, Zinsser was part of the reason I was a technical writer for nearly 15 of my professional years. 1. http://i.imgur.com/UGWP4vi.jpg http://i.imgur.com/UGWP4vi.jpg
- userbinator 11y ago...and on the other side, a linguistics professor is a bit more critical about his advice: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18345 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18345 (I expect there will be a post on that site about Zinsser's death too.)
- kimmel 11y agoI read the language log pretty regularly and they tend to have quality content. Then you got a post like this which says the book is bad and everything about it is bad after skimming it in a book store. An entire review based on skimming and a few out of context quotes does not make a well researched and thought out position on a book. At no point does the author say they actually read the book cover to cover. This is just a rant against being prescriptive in your writing since it is not "the one true way". I have read On Writing Well and there is a lot of material covered in this book. I recommend the chapters on editing as that was Zinsser's day job.
- tarheeljason 11y agoThat example affirms the power of "show, don't tell." Those pages, in the raw, assure the novice or insecure writer that even experts revise and resubmit. RIP, Zissner.
- tarheeljason 11y agoZinsser* - my apologies.
- dragop 11y agoGiven the subject, would it be amiss to point out that the title as written here is missing a comma?
- dragop 11y agoNow corrected.
- SixSigma 11y agoOn Writing Well is available online. https://archive.org/details/OnWritingWell https://archive.org/details/OnWritingWell It helped me go from low 70s to high 80s at Uni.