Search results for: William Zinsser
William Zinsser
The Complete Zinsser on Friday
William Zinsser’s collected essays for this website—spanning writing, the arts, and popular culture—won the 2012 National Magazine Award in the category of Digital Commentary. Zinsser, who died in 2015, was the author of 18 books, including the beloved On Writing Well.
Envoi
What I’ve learned writing …
Departures
… editorial board. Jeanie remembers Gay as “prolific. … He was humble and good-natured and laughed easily.” Over 32 years, he wrote 10 articles for the magazine, several of them forerunners of his important books about the Victorian bourgeoisie, psychoanalysis, and his own Germanness.
William Zinsser, whose On Writing Well has been the bible for two
The Writer Who Taught
William Zinsser was my teacher some four decades ago, and we remained friends ever since. That prompts two remarkable thoughts. First, how many of us are close to a college teacher years later? And second, in Bill’s case, the answer was dozens, in person, and millions, through On Writing Well and his many other …
Read MoreHow to Write a Memoir
William Zinsser, a longtime Scholar contributor and dear friend of the magazine, was an extraordinary writer and teacher, whose popular blog on our website, “Zinsser on Friday,” won a National Magazine Award in 2012.
One of the saddest sentences I know is “I wish I had asked my mother about that.” Or my father. Or …
Read MoreMr. Zinsser, I Presume
… a little more dash and color to what I’ve written. Dickens used to tell his contributors to Household Words, “Brighter! Make it brighter!” I can imagine Zinsser saying this to his writing students at Yale, back in the days he taught there.
I read William Zinsser’s On Writing Well when it first came …
Mr. Zinsser, I Presume
… aims to remain easygoing and conversational, just me sharing some of my discoveries and enthusiasms.
Like any sensible person, I’m cowed at the prospect of succeeding William K. Zinsser in this online column for The American Scholar. Even as I type these sentences, I’m wondering if there’s a way to add a …
Flunking Description
I don’t enjoy descriptive writing; I was fed too much George Eliot and Thomas Hardy in school. I can take just so much heath and bracken. I also don’t like to write what I don’t like to read, so I reduce my sentences to the minimum number of facts I think a …
Read MoreThe Complete Zinsser on Friday
William Zinsser’s collected essays for this website—spanning writing, the arts, and popular culture—won the 2012 National Magazine Award in the category of Digital Commentary. Zinsser, who died in 2015, was the author of 18 books, including the beloved On Writing Well.
Envoi
What I’ve learned writing this blog
The Overtone Years …
Writing for the Wrong Reasons
Depressingly often I hear from people who are stalled on a piece of writing for reasons that have nothing to do with actual writing. They are snarled in the machinery of trying to market what they write. Here are three typical recent examples.
A woman I’ll call Ravi, now in her 30s, came from …
Me and My Relationships
Last week I got a letter from the man I once thought of as my broker, who now calls himself my investment counsel and would probably call himself my wealth management adviser if I had any “wealth” for him to manage. He was writing to tell me that Sandra, “the lead assistant assigned to your …
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