If you’re creating content, read and heed William Zinsser’s classic, On Writing Well. If you’ve ever taken a writing class or worked for a newspaper, this is probably on your bookshelf already or, better yet, within easy reach at your desk. While there are chapters that address specific style and usage issues, this book is best read as a way to help you keep bad habits at bay and readers’ needs at the top of your priority list.
In the introduction, Zinsser describes a photograph of the renowned writer and editor, E.B. White. White, on a plain wooden bench at a plain wooden desk typing on a manual typewriter, sits next to a nail keg serving as a wastebasket. “White has everything he needs: a writing implement, a piece of paper, and a receptacle for all the sentences that didn’t come out the way he wanted them to,” Zinsser says. Keeping it simple, avoiding clutter, and picking your words carefully are among the many important lessons in this book.
Zinsser will urge you to keep your audience in mind. How to define your audience? “It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself … If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in .. You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, you don’t want them anyway.” Anyone who’s writing for a living knows this is not always possible. Sometimes your audience is your boss, or your boss’s boss. It might be an editor, good or bad. Sometimes you are at the mercy of a marketing study or focus group feedback. When it comes to getting paid for your writing, you do what you have to do to keep the client happy. Successful writers know that and so do that with only as much debate as is necessary to improve the writing.
Still, if you are writing a blog or a book or something else where you have some say in the matter, this is great advice when it comes to developing your own voice. That, in turn, will allow you to speak with authority on the subject you care about in a way that will make your readers want to listen.
If you’d like to sample a few chapters of On Writing Well, chapters 2 through 4 from an early edition of the book are posted here, courtesy of Kevin Robert Deegan-Krause of Wayne State University.
Would you like to learn more about E.B. White? Here is an essay by Petri Liukkonen that, among other things, explains why E.B. White often kept a copy of Walden nearby.
“Walden is the only book I own, although there are some others unclaimed on my shelves. Every man, I think, reads one book in his life, and this one is mine. It is not the best book I ever encountered, perhaps, but it is for me the handiest, and I keep it about me in much the same way one carries a handkerchief – for relief in moments of defluxion or despair.” (White in The New Yorker, May 23, 1953)
I didn’t understand the concluding part of your article, could you please explain it more?
That may be, in part, because I veered a little off topic. Sorry about that. Basically, the Petri Liukkonen essay provides information on E.B. White, who is a great writer and a great thinker. His comment on the book, to me, summarizes why truly great content is so powerful in that it is indispensable. He’s saying he doesn’t just like his copy of Walden, he needs it.