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1-Page Summary of On Writing Well
Overview
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction is a collection of guiding principles that can help aspiring writers create professional-quality nonfiction in various genres. It argues that writing well is essential for everyone, as it helps people organize their thoughts and communicate more clearly with colleagues. For example, writing can be used to record personal experiences or share memories with others.
Most aspiring writers aren’t trying to write the next New York Times bestseller. They simply want to share their experiences, record family histories, or communicate with coworkers and employees. These memoirists and entrepreneurs face the same frustrations as academics and authors in terms of writing effectively. They use jargon to make their writing sound official but it just ends up being unintelligible. Authors also avoid using the first person, which makes a piece feel cold and inhuman. If you can’t write clearly then your audience will quickly lose interest in what you’re saying because they won’t be able to follow along without getting lost or confused by your vague wording.
Good writing is clear and direct, but a writer’s style should be unique to the individual. Writers who are enthusiastic about their subject can keep an audience interested in their work by pulling them from paragraph to paragraph. Over time, writers will develop their own voice that readers will recognize. However, it’s not good for a writer to try too hard with complex sentences or start off with where they’ll publish the piece or whether editors will like it. Instead of doing those things first, writers should write because they’re genuinely interested in a subject and want to share what they know with others who might be interested as well.
After a writer has written a first draft, the next step is to revise it. Revising means rewriting sentences and phrases so that they are clear and concise. A good writer will always keep revising their work until it’s perfect. They may spend hours on one sentence because they want to make sure that it’s as clear as possible. Good writers don’t submit their work for years because they’re never satisfied with how things sound or look. The final product may seem easy to read, but writing well requires hard work from the author.
To keep a work interesting, writers should be careful not to include too much information. They should cut out any words or sentences that do not serve the larger point of the work. Writers can also eliminate family members who are unimportant in their memoirs and leave out asides that don’t serve the story. Writers shouldn’t use trendy phrases or euphemisms because they’ll sound hackneyed to readers; instead, writers should replace them with single-word descriptions. Passive sentence construction should also be avoided at all costs.
Even though you may not become a celebrated author, it’s important to write. By emulating the work of great authors and practicing writing techniques, anyone can learn how to craft nonfiction that captures the truth of a subject.
This report discusses William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, which was published in 2006.
Key Point 1: An engaging first sentence is key to capturing the attention of the audience.
The first sentence of an essay should be engaging enough to keep the audience reading. If not, they will abandon it and move on to something else. Even if the rest of the essay is well-written and engaging, a writer’s audience will become bored if the beginning is dull or flabby.
When writing a first sentence, there are many different approaches you can take. You could use a “zinger lead”, which is an attention-grabbing opening that provides some startling facts. Alternatively, you could describe the location or event in detail to help readers get into your story and see it as if they were there. Whatever approach you choose, avoid using run-on sentences or boring details in your first paragraph because those things will lose readers’ interest and make them stop reading right away.
