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Notes on On Writing Well (4th Edition) by William Zinsser notes

Ch. 1 - The Transaction

• "Any method that helps people say what they want to say is the right method for them." - p. 5

Ch. 2 - Simplicity

• "strip every sentence to its cleanest components." - p. 7
• "Writers must therefore constantly ask: What am I trying to say?" - p. 12

Ch. 3 - Clutter

• "Clutter is the laborious phrase that has pushed out the short word that means the same thing." - p. 15
• "Look for clutter in your writing and pune it ruthlessly." - p. 19

Ch. 4 - Style

• "The point is that you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up." - p. 20
• "A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person." - p. 23
• "Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal." - p. 26

Ch. 5 - The Audience

• "You are writing for yourself. Don't try to visualize the great mass audience." - p. 27
• "Simplify, prune, and strive for order." - p. 28

Ch. 6 - Words

• "Notice the decisions that other writers make in their choice of words and be finicky about the ones that you select from the vast supply." - p. 37
• "Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation." - p. 37
• "Get in the habit of using dictionaries. My favorite for handy use is Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, . . ." - p. 37
• "An excellent guide to these nuances is Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms." - p. 37-38
• "If all your sentences move at the same plodding gait, which even you recognize as deadly but don't know how to cure, read them aloud." - p. 38

Ch. 7 - Usage

• "All of this merely confirms what lexicographers have always known: that the laws of usage are relative, bending with the taste of the lawmakers." - p. 44

Ch. 8 - Nonfiction as Literature

• "What I am saying is that I have no patience with the snobbery that accompanies "literature" -- The snobbery which says that nonfiction is only journalism by another name, and that journalism by and name is a dirty word." - p. 57

Ch. 9 - Unity

• "All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem." - p. 59
• "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?"" - p. 62
• "Decide what corner of your subject you're going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop." - p. 63
• "As for what point you want to make, every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five -- just one." - p. 63

Ch. 10 - The Lead

• "The most important sentence in any article is the first one." - p. 65
• ". . . salvation often lies not in the writer's style but in some odd fact he was able to discover." - p. 68
• ". . . you should always collect more material than you will use." - 69
• ". . . look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people." - p. 69
• "But narrative is the oldest and most compelling method of holding somone's attention; every body wants to be told a story. Keep looking for ways to couch your information in narrative form." - p. 72

Ch. 11 - The Ending

• "The perfect ending should take the reader slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right to him." - p. 76
• "When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit." - p. 77
• "Something that I often do in my own work is to bring my story full circle--to strike at the end an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning." - p. 79

Ch. 12 - The interview

• "Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid. . . " p. 81
• "Never go into an interview without doing whatever homework you can." - p. 86
• "Make a list of likely questions--it wil save you the vast embarrassment of going dry in mid-interview." - p. 86
• "Your ethical duty to the person being inteviewed is to present his position accurately." - p. 89
• "But after that your duty is to the reader. He or she deserves the smallest package." - p. 89
• "But becareful where you break the quotation. Do it as soon as you naturally can, so that the reader knows who is talking, but not where it destroys the rhythm or the sense." - p. 91

Ch. 13 - Writing About a Place

• "We don't want him to describe every ride at Disneyland, or tell us that the Grand Canyon is awesome, or that Venice has canals. If one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, if somebody fell into the awesome Grand Canyon, that would be worth hearing about." - p. 95
• "As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self--the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells--and keep an objective eye on the reader." - p. 95
• "If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion--it's probably one of the innumerable cliches that have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that it takes a special effort not to use them." - p. 96
• "Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute. . . Find details that are significant. They may be important to your narrative; they may be unusual, or colorful, or comic, or entertaining. But make sure they are details that do useful work." - p. 96

Ch. 14 - Bits & Pieces

• "Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around using a passive verb." - p. 108
• "Most adverbs are unneccessary. You will clutter your sentence and annoy the reader if you choose a verb that has a precise meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning." - p. 109
• "Most adjectives are also unnecessary. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don't stop to think that the concept is already in the noun." - p. 110
• "Pune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: 'a bit,' 'a little,' 'sort of,' 'kind of,' 'rather,' 'quite,' 'very,' 'too,' 'pretty much,' 'in a sense,' and dozens more. They dilute both your style and your persuasiveness." p . 111
• "The exclamation point. Don't use it unless you must to achieve a certain effect." - p. 112
• "The dash is used in two different ways. One is to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you have stated in the first part. 'We decided to keep going--it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner.' . . . The other use involves two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence. 'She told me to get in the car--she had been after me all summer to have a haircut--and we drove silently into town.'" - p. 113
• "Learn to alert the reader as early as possible in a setence to any change in mood from the pervious sentence." - p. 113
• "Your style will obviously be warmer and truer to your personality if you use contractions like "I'll" and "won't" when they fit comfortably into what you're writing." - p. 115
• "Don't overstate." - p. 115
• "If the reader catches you in just one bogus statement that you are trying to pass off as true, everything you write thereafter will be suspect." - p. 116
• "The best solutions simply eliminate "he" and its connotations of male ownership by using other pronouns or by alternating some other component of the sentence. "We is a handy replacement for "He"; "our" and "the" can often replace "his." - p. 119
• "Instead of talking about what "the writer" does and the trouble he gets into, I found more places where I could address the writer directly ("You'll often find . . . ")." - p. 120
• "Keep your paragraphis short, especially if you're writing for a newspaper or a magazine that sets its type in a narrow width." - p. 120
• "Dictated sentences tend to be pompous, sloppy, and redundant." - p. 121
• "Surprisingly often a difficult problem in a sentence can be solved by simply getting rid of it." - p. 122
• ". . . the effortless style is achieved by strenuous effort and rewriting. The nails of grammar and syntax are all in place; the english is as good as the writer can make it, and the total piece has a design that pulls the reader along from start to finish." - p. 123
• "Taste is the instinct to know what works and to avoid what doesn't." - p. 125
• "The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women whoare doing the kind of writing you want to do." - p. 127
• "Writing that will endure tends to consist of words that are short and strong; words that anesthetize are words of three, four and fivfe syllables, mostly of Latin origin, many of them ending in "ion" and embodying a vague concept." - p. 129

Ch. 15 - Science, Technology and Nature

• "You just can't assume that your readers know what you assume any boob knows, or that they still remember what was once explained to them." - p. 133
• "Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons. First, it forces you to make sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you." - p. 133
• ". . . imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact that a reader must know before he can learn any more. The second sentence broadens what was stated first, making the pyramid wider, and the third sentence broadens the second, so that gradually you can move beyond mere fact into significance and speculation. . . " - p.134

Ch. 16 - Business Writing

• "Remember that what yhou write is often the only chance you'll get to present yourself to someone whose business you want. If what you write is ornate or pompous or fuzzy, that's how you'll be perceived." - p. 156
• ". . . be yourself when you write. You will stand out as a real person among the robots. . ." - p. 158

Ch. 17 - Sports

• "[The best sportswriters] avoid the exhausted sysnonyms and strive for freshness elsewhere in constructing a sentence." - p. 160

Ch. 18 - Criticism

• "A distinction should therefore be made between a 'critic' and a 'reviewer.'" - p. 173
• "As a reviwer your job is more to report than to make an aesthetic judgment." - p. 173
• ". . . a critic should like--or, better still, love--the medium he is reviewing. The reader deserves a lifelong movie buff who will bring along a reservoir of knowledge, passion and prejudice." - p. 174
• ". . . Don't give away too mujch of the plot. Tell readers just enough to let them decide whether it's the kind of story they tend to enjoy, but not so much that you will kill their eventual enjoyment." - p. 174
• ". . . use as much specific detail as possible. This avoid dealing in generalities, which, being generalities, mean nothing." - p. 174
• "A final caution is to avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver--words like 'enthralling' and 'luminous.'" - p. 175

Ch. 19 - Humor

• ". . . if you're trying to write humor, almost everything you do is serious." - p. 187
• "The writer must find some comic device--satire, parody, irony, lampoon, nonsense--that he can use to disguise his serious point." - p. 189

Ch. 20 - Writing About Yourself

• "If you're a writer, give yourself permission to tell us who you are." - p. 209
• ". . . nobody should use it without posting in full view a surgeon general's warning: EXCESSIVE WIRING ABOUT YOURSELF CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO THE HEALTH OF THE WRITER AND THE READER." - p. 210-211
• "To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth." - p. 212
• "But the most interesting character in a memoir, we home, will turn out to be the person who wrote it." - p. 217

Ch. 21 - Writing with a Word Processor

• "In short, the word processor can concentrate your mind on the craft of writing, revising and editing--much more powerfully than this has ever been possible, because your words are right in front of you in all their infiinite possibility, waiting to be infinitely reshaped." - p. 228
• "I commend one thought to you as you dip your toe in the computer culture: You are more competent than you think you are." - p. 232
• "Like many writers, I don't like to write; I like to have written." - p. 233
• "Remember that the two main virtues of writing are clarity and simplicity. Look for clutter and pune it out. Read your sentences aloud. Do they sound like you? If they don't, fiddle with them until they do." - p. 234

Ch. 22 - Trust Your Material

• ". . . one question you should ask at the start of every article or book is: How strong a presence should you be in your presentation of the facts?" - p. 236
• "Trust your material. And when you go forth to gathher that material, trust yourself." - p. 243

Ch. 23 - A Writer's Decisions

• "Readers can process only one idea at a time, and theey do it in linear sequence. Much of the trouble that writers get into comes from trying to make one sentence do too much work. Never be afraid to break a long sentence into two short ones, or even three." - p. 246
• "Don't give readers of a magazine piece more inormation than they require; if you want to tell more, write a book or write for a scholarly journal.' - p. 247
• "Readers should always feel that you know more about your subject than you've put into writing." - p. 253

Ch. 24 - Write as Well as You Can

• "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 methods 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.'" - p. 267
• "You will only write as well as you make yourself write." - . 273