Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
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Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Meaning, in fact, doesn’t exist until a writer goes looking for it.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
But I had never thought about thinking as a process. How does it work? Why do some people think straighter than others? What are the factors that prevent us from thinking clearly? Can it be taught? I made a note to buy The Art of Thinking when I got back home. I suspected that it would help me to see how so much fuzz gets into the writing machinery
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Memory and intuition and chance associations will always generate a certain percentage of what any writer writes. The remainder is generated by reason.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Their problems were in thinking,
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
Students often feel guilty about modeling their writing on someone else’s writing. They think it’s unethical—which is commendable. Or they’re afraid they’ll lose their own identity. The point, however, is that we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become. But nobody
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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
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“I’ve been grading my students’ lab reports both for their scientific merit,” Professor Potts said, “and for the language in which they tell me what they did, what their results were and how they interpret those results.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All
On the contrary, the writing of the book proved one of its central points: that we write to find out what we know and what we want to say. I thought of how often as a writer I had made clear to myself some subject I had previously known nothing about by just putting one sentence after another—by reasoning my way in sequential steps to its meaning.
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