on-writing-well
The best thing about "On Writing Well" is its clear and practical advice on writing with clarity and simplicity, making it a valuable resource for writers of all levels. Reviewers appreciate the author's engaging style and the wealth of insights provided. On the other hand, some reviewers mention that the book may feel dated in certain aspects, as it primarily focuses on traditional writing techniques that may not align with modern digital communication trends.
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Highlights
Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they’re writing fluently doesn’t mean they’re writing well. That condition was first revealed with the arrival of the word processor. Two opposite things happened: good writers got better and bad writers got worse. Good writers welcomed the gift of being able to fuss endlessly with their sentences—pruning and revising and reshaping—without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen. How could such beautiful sentences not be perfect? — location: 98 ^ref-4384
self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write. — location: 153 ^ref-24038
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. — location: 154 ^ref-14082
secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. — location: 172 ^ref-5644
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. — location: 191 ^ref-36760
We no longer head committees. We head them up. We don’t face problems anymore. We face up to them when we can free up a few minutes. — location: 237 ^ref-44671
“Up” in “free up” shouldn’t be there. — location: 239 ^ref-14219
brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work. — location: 285 ^ref-10269
Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice. — location: 291 ^ref-17069
it’s first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly and to drive nails. Later you can bevel the edges or add elegant finials, if that’s your taste. — location: 314 ^ref-29957
Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself. No rule, however, is harder to follow. It requires writers to do two things that by their metabolism are impossible. They must relax, and they must have confidence. — location: 329 ^ref-28935
Writers are obviously at their most natural when they write in the first person. Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity. — location: 349 ^ref-12650
Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going. — location: 392 ^ref-60290
You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, you don’t want them anyway. — location: 404 ^ref-29083
the unexpected but refreshing words (“deified,” “allure,” “cackling”), — location: 444 ^ref-29815
suggests trying to rearrange any phrase that has survived for a century or two, such as Thomas Paine’s “These are the times that try men’s souls”: — location: 561 ^ref-55998
Good usage, to me, consists of using good words if they already exist—as they almost always do—to express myself clearly and simply to someone else. — location: 701 ^ref-2366
Unity is the anchor of good writing. So, first, get your unities straight. — location: 722 ^ref-41506
One choice is unity of pronoun. — location: 724 ^ref-2689
Unity of tense is another choice. — location: 727 ^ref-49983
Another choice is unity of mood. — location: 733 ^ref-18126
Therefore ask yourself some basic questions before you start. For example: “In what capacity am I going to address the reader?” (Reporter? Provider of information? Average man or woman?) “What pronoun and tense am I going to use?” “What style?” (Impersonal reportorial? Personal but formal? Personal and casual?) “What attitude am I going to take toward the material?” (Involved? Detached? Judgmental? Ironic? Amused?) “How much do I want to cover?” “What one point do I want to make?” — location: 751 ^ref-2367
Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write. — location: 761 ^ref-30500
every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have before. Not two thoughts, or five—just one. — location: 764 ^ref-18132
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third sentence, it’s equally dead. Of such a progression of sentences, each tugging the reader forward until he is hooked, a writer constructs that fateful unit, the “lead.” — location: 785 ^ref-31398
look for your material everywhere, — location: 851 ^ref-30233
Our daily landscape is thick with absurd messages and portents. Notice them. They not only have social significance; they are often just quirky enough to make a lead that’s different from everybody else’s. — location: 857 ^ref-18254
The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right. — location: 951 ^ref-10663
Surprise is the most refreshing element in nonfiction writing. If something surprises you it will also surprise—and delight—the people you are writing for, especially as you conclude your story and send them on their way. — location: 980 ^ref-63875
Active verbs push hard; passive verbs tug fitfully. — location: 997 ^ref-49973
Most adverbs are unnecessary. — location: 1005 ^ref-52011
Most adjectives are also unnecessary. — location: 1019 ^ref-41784
Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: “a bit,” “a little,” “sort of,” “kind of,” “rather,” “quite,” “very,” “too,” “pretty much,” “in a sense” and dozens more. They dilute your style and your persuasiveness. — location: 1031 ^ref-55646
Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. — location: 1035 ^ref-64566
The newly hatched sentence almost always has something wrong with it. — location: 1247 ^ref-47375
You won’t write well until you understand that writing is an evolving process, not a finished product. — location: 1254 ^ref-36616
Try not to use words like “surprisingly,” “predictably” and “of course,” which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. — location: 1365 ^ref-51910
Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does—in his own words. — location: 1459 ^ref-40190
Next to knowing how to write about people, you should know how to write about a place. People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like. — location: 1691 ^ref-35657
Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels. He enjoyed his trip so much that he wants to tell us all about it—and “all” is what we don’t want to hear. We only want to hear some. What made his trip different from everybody else’s? — location: 1700 ^ref-33965
All the details—statistics and names and signs—are doing useful work. Concrete detail is also the anchor — location: 1753 ^ref-37658
the principle of leading readers who know nothing, step by step, to a grasp of subjects they didn’t think they had an aptitude for or were afraid they were too dumb to understand. — location: 2184 ^ref-58639
Imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more. The second sentence broadens what was stated first, making the pyramid wider, and the third sentence broadens the second, so that you can gradually move beyond fact into significance and speculation—how a new discovery alters what was known, what new avenues of research it might open, where the research might be applied. There’s no limit to how wide the pyramid can become, but your readers will understand the broad implications only if they start with one narrow fact. — location: 2186 ^ref-60788
You can take much of the mystery out of science writing by helping the reader to identify with the scientific work being done. — location: 2226 ^ref-50044
The principle of sequential writing applies to every field where the reader must be escorted over difficult new terrain. — location: 2348 ^ref-1571
my four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity. — location: 2518 ^ref-36025