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“Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know—and what we don’t know—about whatever we’re trying to learn.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“An idea can have value in itself, but its usefulness diminishes to the extent that you can’t articulate it to someone else.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Probably no subject is too hard if people take the trouble to think and write and read clearly.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Writing is a way to explore a question and gain control over it,”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it. S. J. Perelman told me that when he was starting out he could have been arrested for imitating Ring Lardner. Woody Allen could have been arrested for imitating S. J. Perelman. And who hasn’t tried to imitate Woody Allen? Students often feel guilty about modeling their writing on someone else’s writing. They think it’s unethical—which is commendable. Or they’re afraid they’ll lose their own identity. The point, however, is that we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become. But”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I'm struck by how much they see and how much they know--and how much I don't.

Good art writing should therefore do at least two things. It should teach us how to look: at art, architecture, sculpture, photography and all the other visual components of our daily landscape. And it should give us the information we need to understand what we're looking at.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Writing could get into corners that other teaching tools couldn’t reach.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“writing is how we think our way into a discipline, organize our thoughts about it and generate new ideas.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“how the act of writing gives the teacher a window into the brain of his student.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written—in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“I’ve singled out the humanities and the sciences because they are regarded as natural opposites, even natural enemies. But this is oversimplifying to make a point. Between English at one end of the spectrum and chemistry at the other are many subjects, like economics, that are a mystery to both camps.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“I like Catch-22, Gravity’s Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels—Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig—invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn’t do the job they had in mind.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Clear writing is the logical arrangement of thought; a scientist who thinks clearly can write as well as the best writer.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“the writing of the book proved one of its central points: that we write to find out what we know and what we want to say.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Beyond that, I confirmed what I had always believed about my craft—that there’s no subject that can’t be made accessible in good English with careful writing and editing.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Reasoning is a lost skill of the children of the TV generation, with their famously short attention span. Writing can help them get it back.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Information is your sacred product, and noise is its pollutant. Guard the message with your life.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written—in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like the solution to a mathematical problem. Perhaps in no other line of work is delayed gratification so delayed.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“had learned by long travail a far from obvious lesson: Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content; the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.)”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“the Abyssinian church and the church of the Sudan were once part of the Eastern church of Byzantium. Thus African music found its way into the Byzantine liturgy, which later filtered out into Europe and colored the Gregorian chants of the early Roman Catholic Church.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“never stopped to ask, “Who is the typical Yale alumnus? Who am I editing for?â€� One of my principles is that there is no typical anybody; every reader is different. I edit for myself and I write for myself. I assume that if I consider something interesting or funny, a certain number of other people will too. If they don’t, they have two inalienable rights—they can fire the editor and they can stop reading the writer.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“One reason for the high response is that everything is voluntary. If the program had been imposed by the administration I don’t think it would work.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“the essence of writing is rewriting. Very few writers say on their first try exactly what they want”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Those subjects were for all those people who had an aptitude for them—the ones who carried a slide rule and could take a radio apart. I was a liberal arts snob, illiterate about the physical world I lived in, incurious about how things worked.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Nonfiction writing should always have a point: It should leave the reader with a set of facts, or an idea, or a point of view, that he didn’t have before he started reading. Writers may write for any number of good personal reasons—ego, therapy, recollection, validation of their lives. But what they produce will have a validity of its own to the extent that it’s useful to somebody else.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“A piece of writing must be viewed as a constantly evolving organism.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“H. L. Mencken said that â€�0.8 percent of the human race is capable of writing something that is instantly understandable.â€� He may have been a little high.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Similarly, the sciences could be demystified for liberal arts types like me. We could write our way into at least a partial understanding of many subjects whose language of numbers and symbols has scared us away.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Students should be learning a strong and unpretentious prose that will carry their thoughts about the world they live in.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“But there are all kinds of reasons why English teachers ought to get some relief. One is that they shouldn’t have to assume the whole responsibility for imparting a skill that’s basic to every area of life. That should be everybody’s job. That’s citizenship.”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All