Book Review: On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

When I was in high school, I asked an English teacher to critique my writing. This was a big mistake. She did a great job offering feedback but I was not mature enough to receive it. As a result, the experience turned me off to writing. I struggle to write well but I continue to try and I have come to enjoy the writing experience. In an effort to improve my writing, I picked up On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser. After reading it, I would concur that this book will help you write better.

Zinsser was not only someone who taught writing but he also was featured in leading magazines. He also wrote seventeen books.

On Writing Well is a comprehensive guide on writing that is 321 pages long. Zinsser arranged the book in four major parts:

1. Principles
2. Methods
3. Forms
4. Attitudes

To cover these topics, Zinsser shared his wisdom over 25 chapters.

This is certainly a book that I will share with the learners I work with. It is a book I wish I had read before I wrote my dissertation. There are many nuggets of information found throughout the book. I am going to share some of these nuggets.

Principles

When Zinsser discussed principles, he stressed the importance of simplicity and reducing clutter. We have a tendency to try to say too much in a single sentence. I know that I am often guilty of this. I also see a lot of this in academic writing.

Zinsser encouraged writers to break out the thesaurus. He indicated that we can make our writing more interesting by finding stronger words. According to Zinsser, we will also benefit by removing worn-out clichés from our prose. We often try too hard to make our writing interesting. Instead, we need to simplify and strive for accuracy.

When Zinsser wrote about a topic, he used apt examples to highlight his points. It was fascinating to observe how perfectly he crafted his sentences and paragraphs.

Zinsser stated “Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost” (Zinsser, 2016, p. 83). This I certainly learned while working on my dissertation. But the lesson was driven home while writing my first book. The first draft is only the start of the process. One decides how each sentence fits into the narrative after the draft is written.

Forms

While I enjoyed the entire book, in addition to the principles section, I really enjoyed the section on forms. The point Zinsser made was that nonfiction writing does not have to be boring. He demonstrated this through countless examples across a wide range of topics. These topics included: writing about people, writing about place, writing about yourself, science and technology, business writing, sports, writing about the arts, and humor.

According to Zinsser, you write the best when you write from a personal point of view. He pointed out that writing becomes boring when we try to write in the third person. Zinsser noted that we increase interest when we take a point of view. “Remember ‘I’ is the most interesting element in any story” (Zinsser, 2016, p. 175). While writing my book, I remembered having to switch between persons based on the recommendations of different editors. By the time the book was published, I was very comfortable with the results.

I really appreciated the chapter about writing about yourself. Zinsser provided important tips for sharing your past. He encouraged us to simply write a one to three page story about our past and file it away. Over time you will have a collection of interesting stories that you can craft into a larger work once you identify a theme. It is a topic I am interested in but I did not know how to approach it. Now, I do.

On Writing Well provides excellent guidance for crafting interesting works. It is certainly a book that I will have to spend a lot of time with. On a first pass through the book, I picked up many strategies for improving my writing. I now need to spend more time with the book so that I internalize these strategies. If you write as part of your job, I would definitely recommend this book.

Additional Reading

• Book Review: On Reading, Writing and Living With Books
• What I Have Learned Writing a Book
• Book Review: Write Better, Faster: How To Triple Your Writing Speed and Write More Every Day
• Book Review: Scrivener Superpowers: How to Use Cutting-Edge Software to Energize Your Creative Writing Practice
• #ATD2015: Writing Blogs, Articles, and Books to Boost Your Career by Cathy Fyock

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