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Reader Quotes by William Zinsser
- Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors…
- Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the…
- My commodity as a writer, whatever I'm writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don't alter your voice to fit the subject. Develop…
- Finding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn't much help-taste is a quality so intangible that…
- Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with "but." If that's what you learned, unlearn it - there's no stronger word at…
- Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
- 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…
- You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?
- Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z.…
- Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your…
- 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…
More Reader Quotes
- Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance are the writers who take advantage of present… — Samuel Johnson
- I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,'… — Margaret Atwood
- One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered… — Beverly Cleary
- All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick… — Steve Almond
- A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents. — Friedrich Nietzsche
- Sometimes language gets in the way of the story's feelings. The reader finds himself experiencing the language of the story rather than… — Leonard Michaels
- As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr’s hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author… — Eileen Myles
- Writers write for one reason: to create an emotion in the reader, to reach across and make them feel something. You want… — J. Michael Straczynski