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It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences

"The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn’t think of saying it may rain. The sentence is too simple— there must be something wrong with it. But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components."

William Zinsser • On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

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MargaretC • 1 card

Always use “that” unless it makes your meaning ambiguous. Notice that in carefully edited magazines, such as The New Yorker,

William Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice.

William Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction

The Associated Press Stylebook, widely considered to be the gold standard among news organizations, is clear on its rule for the possessive of singular proper names ending in S — only an apostrophe is needed (Harris’), though there are always exceptions. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal all do the opposite, opting... See more

Ben Hickey • Is It Harris’ or Harris’s? Add a Walz, and It’s Even Trickier.

As for the area where our Usage Panel was conservative, we upheld most of the classic distinctions in grammar—“can” and “may,” “fewer” and “less,” “eldest” and “oldest,” etc.—and decried the classic errors, insisting that “flout” still doesn’t mean “flaunt,” no matter how many writers flaunt their ignorance by flouting the rule, and that “fortuitou

William Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction

"Try not to use words like “surprisingly,” “predictably” and “of course,” which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.""Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thought... See more

William Zinsser • On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adul