On Writing Well

The man or woman snoozing in a chair with a magazine or a book is a person who has been given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer.

Yesterday, during lunch, I came across a review of William Zinsser's book, On Writing Well. Just from the title, I knew I wanted to read it. Five minutes later, I had borrowed a copy from the library across the street. By the time I got home, I had read fifty pages.

It's a book that makes me smile, not only as someone who reads, but also as someone who attempts to write. It's a book about writing that is actually readable because the author follows his own principles. Zinsser urges simplicity and discourages clutter. He champions short words over long ones, promotes direct language over euphemisms and encourages the use of a thesaurus. What he says is obvious and common sense, but he says it so well and with warmth and humor.

It's a book that makes me want to go through everything I ever wrote here, rewrite it, read it aloud and rewrite it again. It makes me want to write more, but with greater thought to how I write. It bugs me how careless I can be with words and sentence structure. I blame it on time constraints and laziness.

I don't want my writing to cause readers any "unnecessary trouble" or boredom and when I say readers, I mostly mean me, since I'm supposedly writing for myself. And while I'm sure we would all appreciate more sleep, I would prefer it if what I wrote didn't induce it.

If I can help it, I also want to avoid writing in what Zinsser calls "journalese".

There is a kind of writing that might be called journalese, and it's the death of freshness in anybody's style. It's the common currency of newspapers and of magazines like People – a mixture of cheap words, made-up words and cliches that have become so pervasive that a writer can hardly help using them.

I'm glad I came across this book. I'm sure I'm the last one to ever hear of it, but for me, it's a find. I can't wait to continue it on the train ride home. I only hope that I'll be able to retain and apply what I read, so that someday, I'll be able to write well, too.