On Writing Well

Note to self: Read this book over Christmas vacation and purchase some copies as resources for the spring semester creative writing class you'll be teaching!

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

The Table of Contents:
Part I Principles
Part II Methods
Part III Forms
    -Nonfiction, The Interview, The Travel Article, The Memoir, Science and Technology, Writing in Your Job, Sports, Critics and Columnists, Humor-
Part IV Attitudes

This book is a gold mine for writing teachers and writers alike!  Unfortunately, it is due back to my library in two days and I'm in the midst of grading 100+ student essays/research papers, so I don't have time to read it cover to cover.  Here are a few quotations I found by just flipping through the book:

p. 213-2: Let's start with breeziness.  There is a kind of writing that sounds so relaxed that you think you hear the author talking to you.... The common assumption is that the style is effortless.  In fact the opposite is true: the effortless style is achieved by strenuous effort and constant refining."

p. 79: "Keep your paragraphs short.  Writing is visual--it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.  Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read."

p. 13: "Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, garbage collectors into waste-disposal personnel and the town dump into the volume reduction unit."

p. 15: "Is there any way to recognize clutter at a glance? ...I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn't doing useful work....My reason for bracketing the students' superfluous words, instead of crossing them out, was to avoid violating their sacred prose.  I wanted to leave the sentence intact for them to analyze."

p. 244: "One way to generate confidence is to write about subjects that interest you and that you care about."


And while I'm thinking of meaningful quotations, I heard this one today on a Taylor Swift E! special:
"My parents raised me to never feel like I was entitled to success.  That you have to work for it.  You have to work so hard for it.  And sometimes then you don't even get where you need to go." -Taylor Swift
I have to remember to share this with my students!