Search results for: William Zinsser
What Does It Do?
“I learned long ago that it does no good to complain about the piano,” my teacher Dwike Mitchell told me one day when I was grumbling about still another piano I had been hired to play that nobody had bothered to check for stuck notes, broken pedals, and other infirmities.
“Once you start complaining …
Melville’s South Seas Myth
In 1956 my wife Caroline and I spent two months touring the South Seas. I was then with the New York Herald Tribune, and I used to barter with the managing editor for an extra month of vacation, in return for which I would write articles from parts of the world that his paper was …
Read MoreLife and Work
“What is there in life if you do not work? There is only sensation, and there are only a few sensations–you cannot live on them. You can only live on work, by work, through work. How can you live with self-respect if you do not do things as well as lies in …
Read MoreThe Old Flotilla
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ eastward to the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me. . .
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!
Rudyard Kipling’s maudlin poem, sung by generations of …
Read MorePermission Givers
When Richard P. Feynman, one of the giants of 20th-century physics, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965, he received hundreds of congratulatory letters from friends and admirers, including one from a former student named Koichi Mano. Acknowledging the letter, Feynman asked the young scientist what he working on. Koichi sent a doleful reply …
Read MoreAt Ease in the Stone Age
I think of Norman Lewis as the best travel writer of our times, and in 1995, when a travel magazine asked me to go to England to interview him, I didn’t lose any time getting on the plane. Lewis was then 87 and had just come home from a journey through three of the …
Read MoreRescued by Humor
More thoughts on less seriousness. . .
Humor is not a sweetener to be added when a sad story needs a few laughs. It’s a special angle of vision, given to some people and not to others, integral to their personality, and for memoir writers it’s a lifesaver.
In the second sentence of his best …
Journeys with Joseph Mitchell
Every now and then, seeking to rid my thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market. I usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a walk through the two huge open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New Market, whose fronts rest on South Street …
Read MoreWriting English as a Second Language
A talk to the incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, August 11, 2009
Five years ago one of your deans at the journalism school, Elizabeth Fishman, asked me if I would be interested in tutoring international students who might need some extra help with their writing. She knew I had done …
Visions and Revisions
… would my book differ from all the other books on writing?
The dominant manual at that time was The Elements of Style, by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr., which was E. B. White’s updating of the guide that had most influenced him, written in 1918 by his English professor at Cornell. My …