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Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On Writing Well, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Human Element
Simplicity vs. Clutter
Process and Organization
The Gift of Writing
Summary
Analysis
This chapter consists of advice that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Zinsser organizes it under a series of different headings. The first is Verbs. Writers should use active verbs instead of passive verbs whenever they can. “Joe saw him” is clearer, shorter, and stronger than “he was seen by Joe.” Like unnecessarily long words, the passive voice tires readers out and makes it unclear who’s doing what to whom. Active verbs push writing forward. Vivid verbs like “dazzle” and “swagger” invigorate it. Precise verbs like “resign” and “retire” make actions clearer than phrasal verbs like “step down.”
This chapter is Zinsser’s answer to The Elements of Style: his list of essential dos and don’ts for effective writing. Like Strunk and White, Zinsser doesn’t just impose rules on other writers. Rather, he explains why writers enrich their work by following certain rules. First, he argues that verbs are the lifeblood of the English language. By giving verbs the priority they deserve, the active voice simplifies and improves writing at the same time.
Themes
Adverbs. They’re usually redundant. There’s no reason to say, “effortlessly easy” or “totally flabbergasted.” Writers should also avoid qualifying words like “decidedly,” “arguably,” “eminently,” and “virtually.”
Most of Zinsser’s rules are based on his basic principle: choose simplicity, not clutter. Redundant adverbs and vague qualifiers are classic examples of clutter because they add complexity without adding meaning.
Themes
Adjectives. They’re also usually redundant. Adjectives should add something to the nouns they modify, not just emphasize something the reader already knows about the noun. For example, use “garish daffodils,” not “yellow daffodils.” By using fewer adjectives, writers make them more powerful.
Clutter makes for bad writing because it wastes the reader’s precious time and energy. Redundant adjectives don’t just take up space—they also divert the reader’s attention away from more important words.
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Little Qualifiers. Qualifiers like “a little,” “very,” and “in a sense” dilute prose. They make writers sound less confident, persuasive, and authoritative. Writers should eliminate them.
Qualifiers waste the reader’s time and weaken the writer’s argument. Zinsser wants writers to say more in fewer words. But by using qualifiers, they use more words to say less.
Themes
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Punctuation. Writers should use more periods and break up long sentences into shorter ones. They should avoid exclamation points, which are a cheap and superficial way to add emphasis. The semicolon has fallen out of favor, and modern writers should only use it sparingly. In contrast, the dash is underrated—it helps writers incorporate explanatory details into a sentence. The colon is outdated, like the semicolon, but it’s still useful for lists.
Zinsser shows that punctuation rules depend on readers’ expectations, so they change over time. His punctuation rules are intended for formal writing, and not 21st century genres like the text message or email. He sticks to the same principles as always: simplicity and clarity. Writers should avoid using fancy words and creative punctuation to exaggerate mediocre ideas. Instead, they should just come up with better ideas.
Themes
Mood Changes. Writers should use words like “yet,” “therefore,” and “subsequently” to show readers when they’re shifting direction. It’s acceptable to start sentences with “but.” “However” is a weaker substitute for “but,” but it sounds feeble at the beginning or end of sentences. Other words, like “yet” and “nevertheless,” do belong at the beginning of sentences. These short words are helpful because they replace long, unruly clauses to explain disagreement. Finally, writers should use words like “meanwhile,” “now,” and “later” to clarify changes in timeframe.
Writers might assume that transition words are clutter, because they’re not strictly necessary. But they actually reduce clutter by helping readers avoid confusion. Concise transitions like “but” and “nevertheless” are useful replacements for cluttered phrases like “at the same time, this isn’t the whole story” or “the opposite could also be true.” So Zinsser’s rules about clutter ultimately amount to making work as readable as possible, not necessarily using the minimum possible number of words.
Themes
Contractions. They make writing warmer and more readable. Writers should generally use them but avoid ambiguous contractions like “he’d” (he had, or he would?) and invented ones like “could’ve.”
Zinsser’s advice contradicts most English teachers’ advice (which is to avoid conjunctions), but he’s interested in nonfiction writing for the public, not academic writing for a grade.
Themes
That and Which. “That” is almost always better than “which.” But after a comma, “which” is often necessary to explain the preceding phrase.
This is Zinsser’s only basic grammar tip. Many writers confuse “that” and “which,” but professionals never do.
Themes
Concept Nouns. Bad writers use abstract nouns where good writers use verbs. For instance, they write “the common reaction is incredulous laughter” instead of “most people just laugh with disbelief.” Don’t do this.
Concept nouns tend to clutter academic, business, and legal writing. In these fields, writers try to describe how the world is, rather than what people do. “Most people just laugh with disbelief” emphasizes action, while “the common reaction is incredulous laughter” describes a relationship between two abstract concepts.
Themes
Creeping Nounism. Bad writers use several nouns where good writers just need one. Say “rain” instead of “precipitation activity.”
Creeping nounism is a classic example of jargon—or replacing a common, simple word with an uncommon, confusing one.
Themes
Overstatement. Excessive metaphors are tiresome and ineffective. Don’t say that “the living room looked as if an atomic bomb had gone off there.”
Overstatement is frustrating to read because it’s lazy and imprecise. Everyone knows what the atomic bomb metaphor means, but the writer should work harder to find a better one.
Themes
Credibility. When writers lie or inflate the truth even once, they lose their credibility forever.
Zinsser believes that a writer’s reputation is one of their most valuable assets. They have a duty to speak the truth, so they should be able to stand by anything they publish.
Themes
Dictation. Businesspeople use dictation to save time, but they end up seeming pompous and imprecise on the page. They should at least edit what they dictate.
Reading and listening are different skills that require different kinds of thinking and attention. But when they send dictated letters, businesspeople forget about this difference. They don’t consider the reader’s perspective because they haven’t decided what kind of message they want to send.
Themes
Writing Is Not a Contest. Writers tend to compare themselves to more experienced or commercially successful peers, but this is pointless.
Writing is an individual pursuit—one writer’s success doesn’t affect another’s. In fact, the more good writing reaches readers, the better. Zinsser also repeatedly notes that magazines and publishers accept plenty of bad writing, so publication isn’t really a measure of quality or success. Instead, writers should judge their work by their own standards and their readers’ responses to it.
Themes
The Subconscious Mind. Writing largely depends on the subconscious, which is always working. This is why writers often get new ideas when they wake up in the morning, and why old memories tend to resurface when they’re relevant to a new piece.
For Zinsser, writing requires writers to bring their entire selves to a work. This means that writing is essentially psychological, which helps explain classic writing problems like writer’s block and procrastination
Themes
The Quickest Fix. The best way to fix difficult sentences is often to just delete them. Unfortunately, writers usually spend lots of time trying to save them.
Writers are responsible to the reader, so they have to put clarity before their personal attachment to any specific phrases. But this applies to mechanics, not content: writers should still say what they want about the topics that interest them. They just have to do it in a clear, orderly way.
Themes
Paragraphs. Shorter is better, especially in newspapers; short paragraphs make text more inviting and digestible. But sometimes, newsrooms take this too far and use too many one-sentence paragraphs, which distracts and condescends to the reader.
Reading is visual, and readers notice a paragraph’s length before they start to actually read it. Therefore, paragraph length sets their expectations for a text—and short paragraphs keep them reading.
Themes
Sexism. English is full of sexist language. Many words for women carry a demeaning tone (like “gal,” “poetess,” and “coed”). Don’t treat women as men’s possessions, like in the construction “settlers pushed west with their wives and children.” When possible, find neutral substitutes for gendered terms like “chairman,” but “chair” is better than the invented word “chairperson.” Most importantly, many writers wrongly use “he” as a generic pronoun. The plural “they” can often, but not always, substitute for “he.” Zinsser rejects “he or she” as too clunky, but suggests trying “we,” general nouns, or even “you,” depending on the context.
Zinsser lived most of his life in an era when men controlled the writing profession and used “he” as a default pronoun. He even followed this sexist norm in the first edition of On Writing Well. But after reading Miller and Swift’s Handbook of Nonsexist Writing, he started advocating for equitable language. His principles also apply to other kinds of diversity besides gender. Specifically, inclusive language shouldn’t compromise clarity. When it does, the solution isn’t to give up: it’s to find better inclusive language. The best terms and phrases often depend on context, so writers should rework their sentences until they find a solution that fits.
Themes
Rewriting. It’s “the essence of writing well.” All first drafts can be improved, and professional writers are constantly rewriting. This doesn’t mean starting over from the beginning, but rather “reshaping and tightening and refining” the first draft. Zinsser gives an example of how he would do this with an ordinary paragraph. He notes that sentence-level mechanics are just as important as the logical construction of the piece as a whole. When writers approach their drafts from a reader’s perspective, they can easily see where their construction is shoddy or misleading. Zinsser admits that he’s learned to love rewriting because he feels like his writing is constantly improving.
Of all Zinsser’s tips in this chapter, this one is the most important. Writers are lucky: they get to redo their work and erase their mistakes as many times as they want. But this also makes them responsible for giving their readers clear, digestible prose. For Zinsser, empathizing with those readers is the key to rewriting. By setting their work aside and then reapproaching it from the reader’s perspective, writers can almost always improve it.
Themes
Writing on a Computer. Computers are a gift to writers because they make it possible to rearrange, rewrite, and reword endlessly. Writing has never been easier than it is today.
Computers make the writing process easier, but as Zinsser argued in his introduction, they don’t change the basic elements of good writing. Still, many writers in the 21st century can’t imagine working on anything else.
Themes
Trust Your Material. The truth is usually more interesting than the spin a writer puts on it. Some reporters start their stories with catchy snippets to get the reader’s attention, but they bury their story’s actual details. Zinsser thinks this is pointless: the real “color” in a story has to come out of its facts. When he wrote Spring Training, his book about baseball, he avoided berating the reader with metaphors and symbols. Instead, he interviewed people about their lives and found information interesting enough to capture his readers’ attention without unnecessary embellishment or commentary.
Just like Zinsser thinks that writers have to find their own voice and style over time by learning to write clearly, he thinks that they should learn to make stories interesting by pursuing interesting material. For Zinsser, writers should use language to accurately reveal the truth—not to hide or embellish it. When they use spin to cover up their inadequate research, they are also skipping the most rewarding part of writing: meeting interesting people and pursuing interesting stories.
Themes
Go with Your Interests. No subject is off-limits. Writers should follow their interests, no matter how quirky or specialized they are.
For Zinsser, writing is a beautiful profession because it’s relevant to everything and needed everywhere. Anything in the world can be interesting enough to write about, and everyone in the world is interested in something. Therefore, every field needs its writers. So writers should follow their interests. After all, people write best about topics that matter to them.
Themes
