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Chapter 1
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
Zinsser argues that “clutter is the disease of American writing.” Good writers make their sentences as clean and direct as possible. Many educated Americans use complicated language to sound sophisticated, like the university president who describes protests as “very considerable potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction.” Zinsser gives examples of writers like Franklin D. Roosevelt, who made an effort to simplify his government’s documents, or Henry David Thoreau, whose prose is powerful because it’s plain and direct.
Readers prefer plain English to clutter, so writers should, too. This was also Strunk and White’s core point in The Elements of Style. Writers who assume that complicated prose makes them sophisticated usually fail to imagine the reader’s perspective or truly understand their own purpose for writing. Unlike schoolteachers, readers aren’t usually measuring a writer’s competence or intellect. They can also put down a piece of writing that doesn’t interest them. They really want to be informed, entertained, warned, enlightened, and so on, depending on what they happen to be reading. Good writers understand this, so they try to be direct, not waste the reader’s time by showing off their intellect.
Themes
Zinsser explains that clear writing requires clear thinking. Today’s readers are busy and constantly fighting distractions, so careless writing won’t hold their attention for long. Writers have to identify what they’re trying to say and ask themselves if they’re successfully saying it. Clear thinking isn’t an innate talent—it’s a habit that writers have to learn. And doing it well is incredibly difficult. To make his point, Zinsser includes two pages from this book’s first manuscript. He had already rewritten them several times, but they’re full of edits anyway.
Effective writing is really just a well-crafted string of thoughts, and good writers are people who know how to present interesting thoughts in a digestible way. So the key to writing well isn’t genius or luck: it’s habit. Writers must learn to define their purpose, clarify their thinking, and structure their work effectively. This is hard, but anyone can learn to do it if they’re willing to put in the work.
Themes
