Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content; the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.)

One of them asked him what it took to be a humor writer. “Comic writing,” he said, “needs audacity and exuberance and gaiety—and the most important of these is audacity.” Then he said: “The reader has to believe that the writer is feeling good.” The sentence hit with me tremendous force, especially when he added, almost as an afterthought, “even if

They can be cured only by that most painful of surgical procedures: operating on what the writer has actually written.

Clear writing is the logical arrangement of thought; a scientist who thinks clearly can write as well as the best writer.

Their problems were in thinking,

The way to begin is with imitation.

In my gloom it helps me to remember two things. One is that writing is linear and sequential. If sentence B logically follows sentence A, and if sentence C logically follows sentence B, I’ll eventually get to sentence Z. I also try to remember that the reader should be given only as much information as he needs and not one word more.

Therefore, for the purposes of this book, I’ll generalize outrageously and state that there are two kinds of writing. One is explanatory writing: writing that transmits existing information or ideas. Call it Type A writing. The other is exploratory writing: writing that enables us to discover what we want to say. Call it Type B. They are equally va

Clear writing is the logical arrangement of thought; a scientist who thinks clearly can write as well as the best writer.