What is On Writing Well?
On Writing Well has been praised for its sound advice, its clarity and the warmth of its style. It is a book for everybody who wants to learn how to write or who needs to do some writing to get through the day, as almost everybody does in the age of marketing on the Internet.
Whether you want to write about people or places, science and technology, business, sports, the arts or about yourself in the increasingly popular memoir genre, On Writing Well offers you fundamental principles as well as the insights of a distinguished writer and teacher. With more than a million copies sold, this volume has stood the test of time and remains a valuable resource for writers and would-be writers.
Why did I read it?
To improve as a writer. As a generalist, I write everything from brand messaging to leadership newsletters to tweet-storms. The entry point to how I make a living as a coach is most likely going to come through a CEO reading something I wrote, so it is critical for me to continually improve it.
Why I loved it?
Good writing is like any muscle. If you don't use it, you'll lose it. This book is a straightforward approach to writing; eliminating the froth and nonsense I assumed went into great writing. It teaches you the principles of writing in any genre and then digs deep into the versatility of language specific to each genre. You read the great books multiple times and this is one of the ones I'll pick up again.
If you enjoy writing - this is a must-read.
What are my favorite highlights?
(If you have the book in kindle the location links will take you to it.)
- Only later did I realize that I took along on my journey another gift from my father: a bone-deep belief that quality is its own reward. (Location 4171)
- Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
- For there isn't any "right" way to do such personal work. There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you say what you want to say is the right method for you.
- Ultimately, the product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
- Writing is thinking on paper.
What else did I highlight in the book?
Part I Principles
Chapter 1: The Transaction
If your job is to write every day, you learn to do it like any other job.
For there isn't any "right" way to do such personal work. There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you say what you want to say is the right method for you.
Ultimately, the product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
Chapter 2: Simplicity
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. (Location 157)
Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. (Location 161)
But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. (Location 163)
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. (Location 181)
It won’t do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it’s usually because the writer hasn’t been careful enough. (Location 188)
Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know. Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time? If it’s not, some fuzz has worked its way into the machinery. The clear writer is someone clearheaded enough to see this stuff for what it is: fuzz. (Location 197)
If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. (Location 206)
Chapter 3: Clutter
Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind. (Location 222)
Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, garbage collectors into waste-disposal personnel and the town dump into the volume reduction unit. (Location 243)
Beware, then, of the long word that’s no better than the short word: “assistance” (help), “numerous” (many), “facilitate” (ease), “individual” (man or woman), “remainder” (rest), “initial” (first), “implement” (do), “sufficient” (enough), “attempt” (try), “referred to as” (called) and hundreds more. (Location 263)
Don’t dialogue with someone you can talk to. (Location 266)
I would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work. (Location 272)
Sometimes my brackets surrounded an entire sentence—the one that essentially repeats what the previous sentence said, or that says something readers don’t need to know or can figure out for themselves. Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice. (Location 276)
Chapter 4: Style
Few people realize how badly they write. (Location 295)
If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart. (Location 301)
There is no style store; style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it. (Location 308)
Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself. (Location 314)
writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing. (Location 318)
I don’t want to meet “one”—he’s a boring guy. (Location 342)
A generation ago our leaders told us where they stood and what they believed. (Location 361)
Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going. (Location 374)
Chapter 5: The Audience
You are writing for yourself. (Location 381)
Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. (Location 383)
One is craft, the other is attitude. (Location 389)
The first is a question of mastering a precise skill. The second is a question of how you use that skill to express your personality. (Location 390)
You are who you are, he is who he is, and either you’ll get along or you won’t. (Location 394)
But whatever your age, be yourself when you write. (Location 402)
Never say anything in writing that you wouldn’t comfortably say in conversation. If you’re not a person who says “indeed” or “moreover,” or who calls someone an individual (“he’s a fine individual”), please don’t write it. (Location 405)
“Who am I writing for?” The question that begins this chapter has irked some readers. They want me to say “Whom am I writing for?” But I can’t bring myself to say it. It’s just not me. (Location 481)
Chapter 6: Words
The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original. (Location 513)
The Thesaurus is to the writer what a rhyming dictionary is to the songwriter—a reminder of all the choices—and you should use it with gratitude. (Location 530)
This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize. Therefore such matters as rhythm and alliteration are vital to every sentence. (Location 533)
(I write entirely by ear and read everything aloud before letting it go out into the world.) (Location 550)
Chapter 7: Usage
Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge, and I shared Tuchman’s vow that “author” should never be authorized, just as I agreed with Lewis Mumford that the adverb “good” should be “left as the exclusive property of Ernest Hemingway.” (Location 579)
or that being “rather unique” is no more possible than being rather pregnant. (Location 583)
Myself’ is the refuge of idiots taught early that ‘me’ is a dirty word.” (Location 595)
On the other hand, only 66 percent of our panel rejected the verb “to contact,” once regarded as tacky, and only half opposed the split infinitive and the verbs “to fault” and “to bus.” So only 50 percent of your readers will fault you if you decide to voluntarily call your school board and to bus your children to another town. (Location 596)
Theodore M. Bernstein, author of the excellent The Careful Writer: “We should apply the test of convenience. Does the word fill a real need? If it does, let’s give it a franchise.” (Location 599)
One of the words I railed against was “personality,” as in a “TV personality.” But now I wonder if it isn’t the only word for that vast swarm of people who are famous for being famous—and possibly nothing else. What did the Gabor sisters actually do? (Location 606)
“the pen must at length comply with the tongue,” (Location 614)
think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of. (Location 617)
“Too” when substituted for “very” is clutter: “He didn’t feel too much like going shopping.” But the wry example in the previous paragraph is worthy of Ring Lardner. It adds a tinge of sarcasm that otherwise wouldn’t be there. (Location 622)
The only trouble with accepting words that entered the language overnight is that they often leave just as abruptly. (Location 631)
I don’t want to give somebody my input and get his feedback, though I’d be glad to offer my ideas and hear what he thinks of them. (Location 672)
Part II Methods
Chapter 8: Unity
One choice is unity of pronoun. Are you going to write in the first person, as a participant, or in the third person, as an observer? Or even in the second person, that darling of sportswriters hung up on Hemingway? (“You knew this had to be the most spine-tingling clash of giants you’d ever seen from a pressbox seat, and you weren’t just some green kid who was still wet behind the ears.”) (Location 695)
Therefore ask yourself some basic questions before you start. For example: “In what capacity am I going to address the reader?” (Reporter? Provider of information? Average man or woman?) “What pronoun and tense am I going to use?” “What style?” (Impersonal reportorial? Personal but formal? Personal and casual?) “What attitude am I going to take toward the material?” (Involved? Detached? Judgmental? Ironic? Amused?) “How much do I want to cover?” “What one point do I want to make?” (Location 722)
Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write. (Location 731)
Chapter 9: The Lead and the Ending
I’ve often wondered what goes into a hot dog. Now I know and I wish I didn’t. (Location 776)
Surprise is the most refreshing element in nonfiction writing. (Location 944)
surprises you it will also surprise—and delight—the people you are writing for, especially as you conclude your story and send them on their way. (Location 944)
Chapter 10: Bits & Pieces (Location 948)
Of the 701 words in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, a marvel of economy in itself, 505 are words of one syllable and 122 are words of two syllables. (Location 958)
Verbs are the most important of all your tools. (Location 959)
Make active verbs activate your sentences, and avoid the kind that need an appended preposition to complete their work. (Location 963)
adverb that carries the same meaning. Don’t tell us that the radio blared loudly; “blare” connotes loudness. (Location 969)
The adjective that exists solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader. (Location 988)
Good writing is lean and confident. (Location 996)
Humor is best achieved by understatement, (Location 1016)
Always make sure your readers are oriented. Always ask yourself where you left them in the previous sentence. (Location 1051)
Every writer is starting from a different point and is bound for a different destination. (Location 1110)
You’ll find that almost all of them think in paragraph units, not in sentence units. Each paragraph has its own integrity of content and structure. (Location 1148)
Writing is like a good watch—it should run smoothly and have no extra parts. (Location 1201)
Don’t annoy your readers by over-explaining—by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like “surprisingly,” “predictably” and “of course,” which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material. (Location 1311)
There’s no subject you don’t have permission to write about. (Location 1313)
If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers. (Location 1315)
Part III Forms
Chapter 11: Nonfiction as Literature
The great preponderance of what writers now write and sell, what book and magazine publishers publish and what readers demand is non-fiction.
Today, there's no area of life - present or past- that isn't being made accessible to ordinary readers by men and women writing with high seriousness and grace.
Chapter 12: Writing About People
Whatever form of nonfiction you write, it will come alive in proportion to the number of “quotes” you can weave into it as you go along. (Location 1407)
Interviewing is one of those skills you can only get better at. (Location 1459)
Chapter 13: Writing About Places
One man’s romantic sunrise is another man’s hangover. (Location 1653)
Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute: don’t tell us that the sea had waves and the sand was white. Find details that are significant. (Location 1661)
Like John Calvin’s bad temper, it presents itself as the wild beast in the heart of the heartland. (Location 1723)
the routine eloquence of people who work at a place that fills a need for someone else. (Location 1839)
Chapter 14: Writing About Yourself The Memoir
as Walt Whitman’s Civil War diary Specimen Days and his Leaves of Grass, Thoreau’s Walden and especially his Journals, and The Education of Henry Adams. What excited Kazin was that Whitman, Thoreaum and Adams wrote themselves into the landscape of American literature by daring to use the most intimate forms - journals, diaries, letters and memoirs and that he could also make the same "cherished connection" to America by writing personal history and thereby place himself, the son of Russain Jews, in the same landscape. (Location 1963)
You can use your own personal history to cross your own brooklyn bridge.
Chapter 15: Science and Technology
Writing is thinking on paper. (Location 2083)
Beauty as we understand it, and as we admire it in nature, is never arbitrary. (Location 2201)
Chapter 16: Business Writing Writing in Your Job
If you have to do any writing in your job, this chapter is for you. Just as in science writing, anxiety is a big part of the problem and humanity and clear thinking are a big part of the solution. (Location 2338)
I told them I could only applaud them for submitting to a process that so threatened their identity. In the national clamor over why Johnny can’t write, Dr. Fleishman was the first adult in my experience who admitted that youth has no monopoly on verbal sludge. (Location 2380)
As for “open dialogue, feedback and sharing of information,” they are three ways of saying the same thing. (Location 2396)
He talks in warm and comfortable phrases: “Keep informed,” “let us know,” “I have met,” “Please continue,” “I look forward.” (Location 2411)
I recited my four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity. (Location 2431)
explained about using active verbs and avoiding “concept nouns.” (Location 2432)
Any organization that won’t take the trouble to be both clear and personal in its writing will lose friends, customers and money. Let me put it another way for business executives: a shortfall will be experienced in anticipated profitability. (Location 2449)
“A computer is like a sophisticated pencil. You don’t care how it works, but if it breaks you want someone there to fix it.” Notice how refreshing that sentence is after all the garbage that preceded it: in its language (comfortable words), in its details that we can visualize (the pencil), and in its humanity. The writer has taken the coldness out of a technical process by relating it to an experience we’re all familiar with: waiting for the repairman when something breaks. I’m reminded of a sign I saw in the New York subway that proves that even a huge municipal bureaucracy can talk to its constituents humanely: “If you ride the subway regularly you may have seen signs directing you to trains you’ve never heard of before. These are only new names for very familiar trains.” (Location 2467)
Remember that what you write is often the only chance you’ll get to present yourself to someone whose business or money or good will you need. If what you write is ornate, or pompous, or fuzzy, that’s how you’ll be perceived. The reader has no other choice. (Location 2475)
The way to warm up any institution is to locate the missing “I.” Remember: “I” is the most interesting element in any story. (Location 2491)
What I realized was that most executives in America don’t write what appears over their signature or what they say in their speeches. They have surrendered the qualities that make them unique. If they and their institutions seem cold, it’s because they acquiesce in the process of being pumped up and dried out. Preoccupied with their high technology, they forget that some of the most powerful tools they possess—for good and for bad—are words. If you work for an institution, whatever your job, whatever your level, be yourself when you write. You will stand out as a real person among the robots, and your example might even persuade Thomas Bell to write his own stuff. (Location 2505)
Chapter 17: Sports
Remember that athletes are men and women who become part of our lives during the season, acting out our dreams or filling some other need for us, and we want that bond to be honored. Hold the hype and give us heroes who are believable. (Location 2590)
Chapter 18: Writing About the Arts Critics and Columnists
Chapter 19: Humor
The answer is that if you’re trying to write humor, almost everything you do is serious. (Location 2927)
Humor, to them, is urgent work. It’s an attempt to say important things in a special way that regular writers aren’t getting said in a regular way—or if they are, it’s so regular that nobody is reading it. (Location 2933)
I tried for a year to think of a way to write about this phenomenon. I could have said “It’s an outrage” or “Have these women no pride?” But that would have been a sermon, and sermons are the death of humor. (Location 2943)
The columns that I wrote for Life made people laugh. But they had a serious purpose, which was to say: “Something crazy is going on here—some erosion in the quality of life, or some threat to life itself, and yet everyone assumes it’s normal.” Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it’s still outlandish. (Location 2986)
Therefore I suggest several principles for the writer of humor. Master the craft of writing good “straight” English; humorists from Mark Twain to Russell Baker are, first of all, superb writers. Don’t search for the outlandish and scorn what seems too ordinary; you will touch more chords by finding what’s funny in what you know to be true. Finally, don’t strain for laughs; humor is built on surprise, and you can surprise the reader only so often. (Location 3019)
Mark Singer. Singer is the current star in a long lineage of New Yorker writers—St. Clair McKelway, Robert Lewis Taylor, Lillian Ross, Wolcott Gibbs—who used deadpan humor to assassinate such public nuisances as Walter Winchell, leaving hardly a mark where their stiletto broke the skin. Singer’s lethal potion is concocted of hundreds of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the buccaneers who continue to try the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul,” (Location 3125)
adopted the Chic Young principle—stick to what you know—and began to read from writers who use humor as a vein that runs quietly through their work. (Location 3216)
Part IV Attitudes
Chapter 20: The Sound of Your Voice
My commodity as a writer, whatever I’m writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don’t alter your voice to fit your subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that’s enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and clichés. (Location 3248)
But readers will stop reading you if they think you are talking down to them. Nobody wants to be patronized. (Location 3277)
keep listening for when you rewrite and read your successive drafts aloud. Notice how incriminating they sound, convicting you of being satisfied to use the same old chestnuts instead of making an effort to replace them with fresh phrases of your own. Clichés are the enemy of taste. (Location 3301)
So is the English language when it is gracefully used for the public good. The cadences of Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson came rolling down to me. (Location 3338)
This was a generation reared on television, where the picture is valued more than the word—where the word, in fact, is devalued, used as mere chatter and often misused and mispronounced. It was also a generation reared on music—songs and rhythms meant primarily to be heard and felt. With so much noise in the air, was any American child being trained to listen? Was anyone calling attention to the majesty of a well-constructed sentence? (Location 3344)
After verbs, plain nouns are your strongest tools; they resonate with emotion. (Location 3357)
The Second Inaugural Address reverberates with Biblical phrases and paraphrases: “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.” The first half of the sentence borrows a metaphor from Genesis, the second half reshapes a famous command in Matthew, and “a just God” is from Isaiah. If this speech affects me more than any other American document, it’s not only because I know that Lincoln was killed five weeks later, or because I’m moved by all the pain that culminated in his plea for a reconciliation that would have malice toward none and charity for all. It’s also because Lincoln tapped some of Western man’s oldest teachings about slavery, clemency and judgment. His (Location 3361)
Chapter 21: Enjoyment, Fear and Confidence
The poet Allen Ginsberg, another writer who came to Yale to talk to my students, was asked if there was a moment when he consciously decided to become a poet. Ginsberg said, “It wasn’t quite a choice—it was a realization. I was twenty-eight and I had a job as a market researcher. One day I told my psychiatrist that what I really wanted to do was to quit my job and just write poetry. And the psychiatrist said, ‘Why not?’ And I said, ‘What would the American Psychoanalytical Association say?’ And he said, ‘There’s no party line.’ So I did.” (Location 3433)
Red Smith, delivering the eulogy at the funeral of a fellow sportswriter, said, “Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick.” (Location 3439)
If you want your writing to convey enjoyment, write about people you respect. Writing to destroy and to scandalize can be as destructive to the writer as it is to the subject. (Location 3466)
The moral for nonfiction writers is: think broadly about your assignment. Don’t assume that an article for Audubon has to be strictly about nature, or an article for Car & Driver strictly about cars. Push the boundaries of your subject and see where it takes you. Bring some part of your own life to it; it’s not your version of the story until you write it. (Location 3479)
The reason he knows so much about his field is because it’s his field; you’re a generalist trying to make his work accessible to the public. That means prodding him to clarify statements that are so obvious to him that he assumes they are obvious to everyone else. Trust your common sense to figure out what you need to know, and don’t be afraid to ask a dumb question. If the expert thinks you’re dumb, that’s his problem. (Location 3489)
That was interesting. I’m struck by how often as a writer I say to myself, “That’s interesting.” If you find yourself saying it, pay attention and follow your nose. Trust your curiosity to connect with the curiosity of your readers. (Location 3527)
Chapter 22: The Tyranny of the Final Product
This fixation on the finished article causes writers a lot of trouble, deflecting them from all the earlier decisions that have to be made to determine its shape and voice and content. It’s a very American kind of trouble. We are a culture that worships the winning result: the league championship, the high test score. Coaches are paid to win, teachers are valued for getting students into the best colleges. Less glamorous gains made along the way—learning, wisdom, growth, confidence, dealing with failure—aren’t given the same respect because they can’t be given a grade. (Location 3555)
But mainly it’s because I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow. (Location 3562)
Moral: any time you can tell a story in the form of a quest or a pilgrimage you’ll be ahead of the game. (Location 3652)
Chapter 23: A Writer’s Decisions
Now, what do your readers want to know next? Ask yourself that question after every sentence. (Location 3706)
That concludes the lead. Those six paragraphs took as long to write as the entire remainder of the piece. But when I finally wrestled them into place I felt confidently launched. Maybe someone else could write a better lead for that story, but I couldn’t. I felt that readers who were still with me would stay to the end. No less important than decisions about structure are decisions about individual words. Banality is the enemy of good writing; the challenge is to not write like everybody else. One fact that had to be stated in the lead was how old the six of us were. Initially I wrote something serviceable like “we were in our fifties and sixties.” But the merely serviceable is a drag. Was there any way to state the fact with freshness? There didn’t seem to be. At last a merciful muse gave me Medicare—and thus the phrase “from late middle age to Medicare.” If you look long enough you can usually find a proper name or a metaphor that will bring those dull but necessary facts to life. (Location 3735)
Desperately poor, Mali was people-rich. (Location 3767)
only consolation for the loss of so much material is that it isn’t totally lost; it remains in your writing as an intangible that the reader can sense. Readers should always feel that you know more about your subject than you’ve put in writing. (Location 3786)
What I’m after is resonance; it can do a great deal of emotional work that writers can’t achieve on their own. (Location 3809)
When I found “forsaken” in my Roget’s Thesaurus I was quite sure I had never used it before. (Location 3811)
Chapter 24: Writing Family History and Memoir
Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into. (Location 3962)
Memories too often die with their owner, and time too often surprises us by running out. (Location 3967)
What my father did strikes me as a model for a family history that doesn’t aspire to be anything more; the idea of having it published wouldn’t have occurred to him. There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with being published. Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is to come to terms with your life narrative. (Location 3978)
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. (Location 3990)
This brings me to another question that memoir writers often ask: What about the privacy of the people I write about? Should I leave out things that might offend or hurt my relatives? What will my sister think? Don’t worry about that problem in advance. Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it—now. Don’t look over your shoulder to see what relatives are perched there. Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue. If you wrote your family history only for your family, there’s no legal or ethical need to show it to anyone else. But if you have in mind a broader audience—a mailing to friends or a possible book—you may want to show your relatives the pages in which they are mentioned. That’s a basic courtesy; nobody wants to be surprised in print. (Location 4024)
If your sister has a problem with your memoir she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past. Some of your relatives will wish you hadn’t said some of the things you said, especially if you reveal various family traits that are less than lovable. But I believe that at some deep level most families want to have a record left of their effort to be a family, however flawed that effort was, and they will give you their blessing and will thank you for taking on the job. If you do it honestly and not for the wrong reasons. (Location 4031)
Remember: Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance—not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you and shaped the person you became. (Location 4131)
Chapter 25: Write as Well as You Can
Only later did I realize that I took along on my journey another gift from my father: a bone-deep belief that quality is its own reward. (Location 4171)
But to succeed you must make your piece jump out of a newspaper or a magazine by being more diverting than everyone else’s piece. You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into an entertainment. Usually this means giving the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of devices will do the job: humor, anecdote, paradox, an unexpected quotation, a powerful fact, an outlandish detail, a circuitous approach, an elegant arrangement of words. These seeming amusements in fact become your “style.” When we say we like the style of certain writers, what we mean is that we like their personality as they express it on paper. (Location 4178)
If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. (Location 4194)
Most writers won’t argue with an editor because they don’t want to annoy him; they’re so grateful to be published that they agree to having their style—in other words, their personality—violated in public. Yet to defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive. (Location 4200)