Free writing advice
“As with playing a musical instrument: no one can make you play in tune if you’re not interested. If you are interested, a good teacher can show you what you’re doing right and point you toward ways to improve.”
William Zinsser (1922–2015)
“William Zinsser was a giant of sane, humane guidance in writing.”
Why I (still) blog
“I (still) blog, and I still write letters (with a fountain pen), and I still wear an analog watch (Timex). That fewer and fewer people do so makes no difference to me. My writing practice here is, to use a Van Dyke Parks phrase, of supreme unimportance . One can read that phrase with emphasis on the third word or the second.”
You should absolutely expect him to deliver those buzzwords
Lucy Kellaway examines a sentence from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.
Joseph Mitchell, scissors, paper clips
Writing habits.
How to improve writing (no. 57)
When you speak in speech balloons, save some helium.
How to improve writing (no. 56)
A disappointing sentence from USA Today.
One more from Sheridan Baker
Writing is devilish. It hypnotizes us into believing we have said what we meant, when our words actually say something else: ”Every seat in the house was filled to capacity.”
The Practical Stylist
“The voice that speaks in The Practical Stylist is not that of a textbook: it’s that of an older writer addressing a younger writer, without condescension, offering insight and advice from long experience.”
Geoffrey Pullum on On Writing Well
What On Writing Well offers is not “mendacious drivel about passives and modifiers” but sound advice about lifeless sentences and dopey overwriting. But you wouldn’t know that if you were to trust Geoffrey Pullum.
How to improve writing (no. 55)
Improving Mark Trail.
How to improve writing (no. 54)
Improving Mark Trail.
Raymond Carver on words and punctuation
“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.”
Harry Mathews on writing
“Writing well is so hard — that’s why it’s fun to go for.”
Marginalia
Exhibits of marginalia.
How to improve writing (no. 53)
If sentences are, as Richard Lanham says, attention economies, they must respect a reader’s time and intelligence. Revision is courtesy.
Roger Angell FTW
Roger Angell’s essay “This Old Man” has won a National Magazine Award for The New Yorker in the category of Essays and Criticism.
A page-ninety test
Whoever this book’s intended reader might be, it wasn’t me.
How to improve writing (no. 52)
Different from, not than.
On paper clips
Taking paper clips seriously has made me look strange to people who should know better.
Our words, our selves
Barbara Wallraff: “With our words — particularly our written words, or words that we have written down before we say them — we can be our best selves, and even selves better than our actual best.”
An observation about writing, from Richard Marius
On writing every day.
Just a sentence more from Patrick Leigh Fermor
“They had once been very rich, but, like everyone else, they were less so now.”
Leigh Fermor and Proust
“I feel so involved in them all, I don’t know what I’ll do when I’ve finished.”
“Like rear lamps fading through a fog”
Patrick Leigh Fermor, writing about Prague.
Recently updated
WhiteSmoke now has a demo, and the results do not inspire confidence.
Word processing, c. 1987
“It amuses me to realize that while many an English Department still houses a ‘computer lab’ (a classroom filled with the hum of machines), the prospect of writing in a word processor has come to feel faintly quaint.”
“You can improve that paper”
Geoffrey Pullum has advice for students.
“Footpads and knaves”
From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts.
How to improve writing (no. 51)
A ponderous start, needless words, and general lifelessness.