Over Thanksgiving I visited with a cousin who wanted to do some writing as a sidelight to his day job in finance. We got to talking about good reference books for nonfiction writing. He asked if I had heard of a writer named William Zinsser.
Hearing Zinsser’s name brought a smile. He was a long-time freelance writer who wrote about a great many topics. His work appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and American Scholar. But for nonfiction writers, Zinsser is best remembered for his book On Writing Well, first published in 1976 and since expanded and revised over the years.
On Writing Well is one of those books that belongs on a List of Books Each Nonfiction Writer Should Read. Among other things, he argues that there’s no one “right” way to write. Rather, it’s just lots of work, creating sentences and then revising them—over and over again, as necessary—to express your thoughts.
Like other writing tomes—The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White, and the Associated Press Style Guide come to mind—you read and absorb the lessons. Then, you put the books on your bookshelf and get back to meeting your deadlines. But it is good, every now and then, to take the books off the shelf and give them a re-read. When you do so, you’re looking at things from the perspective of your experience—and the lessons take on a new relevance.
Zinsser died in 2015. But his works, and the good advice in them, will remain with us always.
