Summary Of On Writing Well By William Zinsser

William Zinsser’s novel, On Writing Well, gives an aspiring writer a guide to writing clear, well-written nonfiction. His second chapter entitled “Simplicity”, comments on the importance of eliminating unnecessary words, phrases, and sentences in order to create more concise, clearer works. Writing this way allows the writer to express their thoughts in an accessible way to the reader, making it more appealing. Zinsser states that the reader’s first instinct is blaming themselves when they cannot understand a piece of the passage although it is mostly due to the fault of the muddy writer; eventually, the flustered reader will move on to a more accessible writer. The simpler way of writing that Zinsser proposes in this chapter is more useful,

I agree with his statement that clutter is like a disease; we see this in everyday life through advertisements, articles, and other media where unnecessary words run rampant. Further, Zinsser’s examples of cluttered everyday correspondences help the reader see how prevalent this problem is. They also show that reading a less complicated passage makes the message clearer and cleaner than reading a cluttered mess, such as his example with the flight attendant saying “he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation” (Zinsser 7). It is more simple to state, “it will rain” and far easier to understand. I agree with Zinsser’s assessment that the nature of our cluttered writing flows from our desire to sound more

His depiction accurately shows how we are all bombarded with information from so many various sources, so the writer who makes their writing difficult to read will not win the reader’s attention for very long. I agree with Zinsser’s idea that a reader may be lost by a writer’s carelessness, whether this manifests through cluttered sentences, bad construction, switching pronouns or tenses, bad sentence flow, or incorrect vocabulary. The carelessness of the writer may leave a lot of room for inferences on what the writer is actually trying to say rather than his intended