Review of "On Writing Well"

Writing, whether we like it or not, is the central form of communication for the modern world. Everything starts in writing; movies begin as screenplays, classes are based on written instruction and speeches start off as lecture notes. The Internet–the global communication network–is mostly in writing. With such a large role in our society, good writing is vital for a successful career in most fields.

Good writing isn’t something you’re born with. You get it from lots of practice, and lots of reading on how to write. Whether you agree with everything a “How To” book tells you on writing–or nothing at all–it still shows you the way one successful writer writes.

The reason I open with this statement is that if you’re anything like me, you’re probably too proud to think your writing needs much improvement, if any. I’m not trying to sound arrogant; it’s just that I have been writing for many years and fancy myself pretty good at it. But even the self-proclaimed good writers can improve on their technique.

On Writing Well is a great resource for a student in pursuit of any degree. It’s not just for students, either. Even those professionals who have already landed their careers can benefit from the advice William Zinsser gives. It’s not even a dry book–like so many publications on writing out there. The author does a nice job of making an instruction book fun and interesting. He uses humor and colorful stories to get a lot of his points across.

In On Writing Well, Mr. Zinsser breaks writing down into four different parts, split into 25 techniques and subjects. He first discusses the backbone of writing: style, the audience, words, usage, etc. Then he talks about the project you’re writing as a whole and unifying different pieces into one masterful product. He then discusses the different avenues of nonfiction: literature, interviews, travel, science and technology and sports, to name a few. Finally, he ends his work with attitudes–the attitude you’re implying in your writing, to be exact.

When writing for a particular audience, Mr. Zinsser reminds you to tailor your work to that audience. This might sound simple; however, as Mr. Zinsser points out, if your writing is boring, confusing or just plain sloppy, your readers will quickly lose interest. Throughout the book he discusses these techniques and gives the reader excerpts from actual writers’ work so he or she gets an example of what he’s talking about in his instruction.

William Zinsser, working.

Mr. Zinsser warns against overusing exclamation points (I rarely use them outside of texting). He discourages fragment and run-on sentences. He reminds us when to use “that” verses “which.” I found that bit, “If your sentence needs a comma to achieve its precise meaning, it probably needs ‘which’” particularly helpful. And on top of this, he also condones the use of conjunctions at the beginning of sentences–which justifies my liberal use of at the beginning of sentences in this review.

I have experience in writing about science, but writing about sports has always been a weak point for me. Taking interviews has always been something I’ve wanted to do, but never known how. He gives advice on writing memoirs, as well. I have been interested in writing a memoir for a while, so this is definitely an appealing part of the book for me.

Even though I didn’t agree with everything he said in his book (an example of this is his refusal of giving up the sexist pronoun, he), I still got a lot out of reading it. If you are a professional writer, novice writer or someone who only writes to meet quotas, On Writing Well is an informative piece that helps fine-tune your skills at writing. Mr. Zinsser does his best to cover every aspect of writing, whereas most other writing books cover one topic, or genre. I definitely recommend finding a place in your bookshelf for this reference book.

I bought my paperback copy in the local Barnes & Noble for $9.60. If you get it off Amazon.com it’s a couple dollars cheaper. You can also get it from Amazon.com in a hard cover for about $18. If you like to snuggle up to your Kindle or Nook when you read, alas, this book has no digital format.