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Chapter 7
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
Writers learn through practice, and writing is really about solving a series of problems: what material to include, how to organize it, and so on. In good writing, unity is crucial. This includes pronouns (first, second, or third person), tenses (past, present, or future), and moods (casual, formal, or any other). Zinsser quotes from a poorly-written article about a trip to Hong Kong. It starts as a first-person memoir, then switches into the practical third-person of a travel guidebook. These jarring shifts show how disunity makes for bad writing.
Like the subject of the last two chapters (word choice), structure is also essential to good writing. Zinsser suggests that writers should choose pronouns, tenses, and moods to set up a unified structure for their work. The Hong Kong travel article is bad writing because its shifts in tone are likely to confuse the reader. Since it lacks unity, it has no overall narrative arc. Writers can avoid this kind of embarrassing mistake by simply taking the time to establish unity before they start.
Themes
To create unity, writers should ask certain questions before they start. They should determine their writerly persona, the attitude they want to convey, and the pronouns and tense they want to use. Most importantly, they should define their article’s scope and decide their main point. Most nonfiction writers try to say too much, but it’s better to “think small.” To help determine tone, writers should choose which “provocative thought” they want to inspire in readers. If the travel writer had asked these questions, he could have incorporated his personal story and his practical advice into his article without losing his readers’ attention. Writers often have to adjust their “unities” after they’ve already started, but there’s nothing wrong with doing so.
Simplicity is a useful principle for structure as well as style. By “think[ing] small,” writers improve their writing in two ways at once: they refine their message and they avoid researching topics that wouldn’t end up in their work anyway. Therefore, Zinsser thinks writers should choose one narrow topic and get to work, rather than trying to say everything that comes to mind. The Hong Kong article fails to hold the reader’s attention because, in trying to say everything, it fails to say anything at all.
Themes
