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Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

robinwieruch.de

71–72 of 72 posts

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#71
post #3

I was so disappointed with this book. Some of the platitudes Zinsser goes into are reasonable, like try to be uncluttered, direct and to the point, but all the worked examples seem to just be arbitrarily chosen to his taste. For example, in the chapter on "clutter", Zinsser picks out this passage from Walden as his exemplar of "uncluttered English": "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front…

I highly recommend “Style: Toward Clarity and Grace,” by Joseph Williams. It’s by far the best advice on writing I’ve ever read. I learned about it from Norman Ramsey’s website [1], which has many other good resources. Another good book is the “HBR Guide to Better Business Writing,” by Bryan Garner.

[1] http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/students/writing.html

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#72
One trick that has been very helpful when editing my books is to use the Mac OS text-to-speech functionality. I find I can catch a lot of typos this way, and rereading multiple times allows me to improve the clarity. Highly recommended!

Here is how to setup a shortcut key: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem... (Mac OS X only)

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