- Tags:: 📚Books , Writing is thinking
- Author:: William Zinsser
- Liked:: 6
- Link:: Amazon.com: On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction: 9780060891541: Zinsser, William: Libros
- Source date:: 1976-01-01
- Finished date:: 2022-12-10
- Cover::
Why did I want to read it?
Porque Writing is thinking.
What did I get out of it?
Introduction
Predicting the impact of Foundational models:
… the essence of writing is rewriting (…) 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? (p. xii)
I don’t know what still newer marvels will make writing twice as easy in the next 30 years. But I do know they won’t make writing twice as good. That will still require plain old hard thinking. (p. xiii)
The transaction
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is (…) This is the personal transaction that’s at the heart of good non-fiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important qualities that this book will go in search of: humanity and warmth. (p. 5)
I don’t like to write. I like to have written (p. 88)