8. For the Unity in Writing, Writer Should Focus on Unity of Pronoun, Tense, and Mood

1. Learn to write by writing. Force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
2. Writing is a question of solving a problem. A problem may be where to obtain the facts or how to organize the material. Even, it may be a problem of approach or attitude, tone or style. And "it has to be confronted and solved.
3. "Unity is the anchor of good writing. So, first, get your unities straight. Choose from among the many variables and stick to your choice. "
4. "One choice is unity of pronoun." Write in first person, as a participant, or in the third person, as an observer, or even in the second person.
5.  "Unity of tense is another choice." Write in the past tense or in the present tense. But, do not switch back and forth, because it is not agreeable. 
6. "Another choice is unity of mood." Writer can talk to the reader in the casual voice. Or he can approach the reader with a certain formality to describe a serious event or to present a set of important facts.
7. "Ask yourself some basic questions before you start."
• "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 or 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?"

"Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write."

8. "Think small." "Decide what corner of your subject you're going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop."
9. "Adjust your style accordingly and proceed to whatever destination you reach. Don't ever become the prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints."
10. When the second part of article is badly out of joint with the first, go back to the beginning and rewrite it so that the mood and style are consistent from start to finish.
11. "There's nothing in such a method to be ashamed of."

These are my summary notes on 'Unity' from a book "On Writing Well" written by William Zinsser.

7. Express Yourself Clearly and Simply to Make Good Usage of English

1. "What is the good usage of words? What is good English? Who is to be the judge?"
2. "Why is one word good and another word cheap?"
3. There is no clear answer, as the usage has no fixed boundaries.
4. "Language is a fabric that changes from one week to another, adding new strands and dropping old ones.
5. The 'Usage Panel" of The American Heritage Dictionary took stand that they were not pedants, so hung up on correctness that they did not want the language to keep refreshing itself with phrases like "hung up". But that did not mean they had accepted every atrocity that comes stumbling in.
6. To try to separate usage from jargon is one helpful approach for the good usage. For example, "prioritize" sounds more important than "rank", but it is a jargon. To use "rank" instead of "prioritize" is the good usage.
7. Writers need short and vivid words. Good English separates from technical English when writer selects such words.
8. "Good usage, to me, consists of good words if they already exist - as they almost always do - to express myself clearly and simply to someone else."

These are my summary notes on 'Usage' from a book "On Writing Well" written by William Zinsser.

6. A Writer Should Develop a Respect for Words

1. A kind of writing called journalese that contains a mixture of cheap words, made-up words, and clichés.
2. Writer must fight these phrases.
3. A writer cannot be recognized as a writer unless he develops a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning.
4. "Journalese is a quilt of instant words patched together out of other parts of speech." For example, adjectives are used as nouns such as "greats", "notables".  The "host" (noun) is used as verb ("to host"). Nouns are chopped off to form verbs ("enthuse", "emote") or they are padded to form verbs ("beef up," "put teeth into").
5. To avoid such writing is to care deeply about words.
6. "The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original."
7. "Writing is learned by imitation."
8. Read the men and women who are/were doing the kind of writing you want to do and try to figure out how they did it. "But cultivate the best models. Don't assume that because an article is in a newspaper or a magazine it must be good."
9. "Also get in the habit of using dictionaries." such as Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition. "If you have any doubt of what a word means, look it up. Learn its etymology and notice what curious branches its original root has put forth. See if it has any meanings you didn't know it had. Master the small gradations between words that seem to be synonyms."
10. "Thesaurus is to the writer what a rhyming dictionary is to the song writer." Use Roget's Thesaurus. It saves the time.
11. "Also bear in mind, when you're choosing words and stringing them together, how they sound." This is because readers enjoy both the arrangement and the effort to entertain them.
12. Every writer should read The Elements of Style (written by E. B. White) once a year.
13. "Good writers of prose must be part poet, always listening to what they write."
14. "Such considerations of sound and rhythm should be woven through everything you write. Read everything aloud before letting it go out into the world. You'll begin to hear where the trouble lies."
15. "An occasional short sentence can carry a tremendous punch. It stays in the reader's ear."
16. "Remember that words are the only tools you've got. Learn to use them with originality and care."

These are my summary notes on 'Words' from a book "On Writing Well" written by William Zinsser.

5. You Write for Yourself

1. The fundamental question in writing is "Who am I writing for"? And its fundamental answer is "You are writing for yourself."
2. "Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new."
3. If a sudden impulse of humor amuses the writer, he can put it in his writing with no worry whether the reader will get it.
4. First master a precise skill of writing (craft), then, use that skill to express your personality (attitude).
5. Do not lose the reader and still be carefree about his opinion. But how? Here is a solution:

• "First, work hard to master the tools. Simplify, prune and strive for order. This is a mechanical act, soon sentences will become cleaner." At least sentences will be grounded in solid principles, and chances of losing the reader will be smaller.
• Expressing who you are is a creative act. "Relax and say what you want to say. And since style is who you are, you only need to be true to yourself to find it gradually emerging from under the accumulated clutter and debris, growing more distinctive every day. Perhaps the style won't solidify for years as your style, your voice. Just as it takes time to find yourself as a person, it takes time to find yourself as a stylist, and even then, your style will change as you grow older.

These are my summary notes on 'The Audience' from a book "On Writing Well" written by William Zinsser.

 

4. Style is Organic to the Person Doing the Writing

1. The writer should bring writing on the level of carpentry. Then, the issue of writer's identity comes.
2. The writer has to strip his/her writing down before he/she can build it back up.
3. One must know what the essential tools are and what job they were designed to do.
4. Never forget that practicing a craft is based on certain principles.
5. Like weak nails make house weak, weak verbs make syntax rickety and sentences fall apart.
6. Nobody becomes a well-crafted writer overnight, not even the famous writer her/himself.
7. "There is no style store; style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it."
8. "Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore, a fundamental rule is: be yourself."
9. To follow rule, writer must relax, and must have confidence.
10. A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
11. Writer feels he is in misery. But there is no cure to put him out of these miseries. "Some days will go better than others."
12. "Writers are obviously at their most natural when they write in the first person."
13. "Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity. Therefore, I urge people to write in the first person: to use "I" and "me" and "we" and "us."
14. Writers argue that nobody cares about their opinions. But people or readers will care if the writer tells them something interesting.
15. Vast regions of writing (such as academic world, news stories in newspapers, articles in magazines, businesses and institutions reports, colleges, term papers or dissertations) do not allow any first-person pronoun. "Many of those prohibitions are valid."
16. "If you aren't allowed to use "I," at least think "I" while you write, or write the first draft in the first person and then take the "I"s out. It will warm up your impersonal style."
17. "Leaders who bob and weave like aging boxers don't inspire confidence—or deserve it. The same thing is true of writers. Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal."
18. "Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going."
19. These are my summary notes on 'Style' from a book "On Writing Well" written by William Zinsser.

These are my summary notes on 'Style' from a book "On Writing Well" written by William Zinsser.

3. Clutter is an Enemy of Good Writing

1. Clutter is like weeds. Farmers are always behind weeds to fight, writers are also slightly behind clutter.
2. All the prepositions that are draped onto verbs that do not need any help are clutters. For instance, an "up" in "head committees up" and "we face up to the problems when we can free up a few minutes" does not serve any purpose.
3. Some adjectives come into the language to distinguish one with another thing but they debase both the language and the purpose of their use.  Such as, "personal" in "a personal friend of mine", "his personal feeling" or "her personal physician" debases both language and friendship, feeling, and physician. In these phrases the "personal" can be eliminated.
4. "Clutter is the laborious phrase that has pushed out the short word that means the same thing." Phrases like "currently”, “at the present time," or "presently", replace "now" in people and businesses.
5. "Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, garbage collectors into waste disposal personnel and the town dump into the volume reduction unit."
6. "Clutter is political correctness gone amok."
7. "Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes." The General Motors used "volume-related production-schedule adjustment" to inform they had a plant shutdown. When companies completely fail or go belly-up, they are said to have "a negative cash-flow position."
8. "Clutter is the language of the Pentagon calling an invasion a "reinforced protective reaction strike" and justifying its vast budgets on the need for "counterforce deterrence."
9. Clutter remains as the verbal camouflage that reaches its new heights. To mean "now," General Alexander Haig started saying "at this juncture of maturization" during his tenure as President Reagan's secretary of state.    
10. "Clutter is the enemy." "Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous" (many), "facilitate" (ease), "individual", (man or woman), "remainder" (rest), "initial" (first), "implement”, (do), "sufficient" (enough), "attempt" (try), "referred to as" (called) and hundreds more."
11. "Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write."
12. Phrases like "It should be pointed out" and "It is interesting to note" can be added in sentences when it should be pointed out or if it is interesting to note.
13. " Don't inflate what needs no inflating: "with the possible exception of" (except), "due to the fact that" (because), "he totally lacked the ability to" (he couldn't), "until such time as" (until), "for the purpose of" (for)."
14. "Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Re-examine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?"

These are my summary notes on 'Clutter' from a book "On Writing Well" written by William Zinsser.

Image: Art Supplies Clutter on Wooden Table in Art Studio, Marshall Arts Gallery, Memphis, United States

                Image source: Khara Woods kharaoke, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

2. Secretes of Simplicity in Writing

In many occasions, we see the man or woman snoozing on a chair with a magazine or a book. What do you think about such person? Is he/she a dumb who cannot trail through the written ideas? As William Zinsser, an American writer and a teacher, tells, he/she is a reader who was given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer.

The reader has an attention span of about 30 seconds. Zinsser claims that the reader is also a person assailed by many forces competing for attention. Those forces were newspapers, magazines, radio, home entertainment center (television and video games), the fax machine, children, and pets, etc., in old days. Now, the list of such forces includes smart phones, social networking sites, gaming platforms, email, the internet, a fitness programme, a pool, a lawn, and sleep.

The reader is easily lost, if the writer hasn’t been careful enough. As Zinsser declares, the carelessness may be of any form. A sentence becomes so exclusively cluttered that the reader does not know what it means. Writer switches pronoun in mid sentences or switches tenses, so the reader loses track of who is talking or when the action took place. Sentence B is not a logical sequel of Sentence A because the writer does not provide the missing link. Writer uses a word incorrectly by not taking the trouble to look it up.

Zinsser writes that the reader loses interest because people even with high education and position in America and other countries tend to inflate and sound important. He provides notable examples to explain such tendencies. The airline pilot announces that he is “presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation” to notify passengers about rainfall during their flight. Zinsser’s university president writes “you are probably aware that we have been experiencing very considerable potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction on issues only partially related” in his letter to alumni to mollify a spell of campus unrest in 1960s.

These sentences have clutter. The clotted language is with a word that serves no function, a long word that can be short, an adverb that carries same meaning that is already in the verb, the passive construction that leaves reader unsure of who is doing what. Such words weaken the strength of a sentence.

The cluttered sentences are stripped to their cleanest components as the secrete of good writing. Zinsser provides some examples of sentences constructed with such action. He quotes from the government’s memos of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the blackout order of 1942: “Such preparations shall be made, as will completely obscure all federal buildings and non-federal buildings occupied by the federal government during air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illuminations.” “Tell them that buildings where they have to keep work going to put something across windows.”

He picks another example of uncluttered sentence from Walden, where a man plainly and clearly says “I went to woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

To achieve enviable freedom from clutter, Zinsser further tells to clear heads of clutter. Clear thinking always exists with clear writing. Zinsser lists questions that writer must ask constantly as: 

What am I trying to say? Have I said it (ask after looking at what you have written.)? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time? He adds that the clear writer is someone clearheaded enough to see this for fuzz. Zinsser does not mean that some people are born clear headed and are therefore natural writers, whereas other are naturally fuzzy and will never write well. The writer achieves clear thinking by his/her conscious act and by forcing on him/herself as it requires in projects like making a shopping list or doing an algebra problem. Good writing does not come naturally.

Zinsser concludes that writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. If you find writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.

1. The Writer's Affair with Writing

Like many students and enthusiasts, I wondered how writers write well-crafted articles and books, how they feel to be a writer, and what affects their writing. But, I never tried to ask such questions to them. I let my questions remain quiet in subtle mind for many years.

As a way to soothe office stresses in the evening, I was browsing YouTube, there appearred a video with thumbnail showing a book "Writing to Learn". Then, I played it. It was a self-help video based on a book by William Zinsser. Once I finished watching, I searched such book on Google serach engine. Google suggested many books by William Zinsser along with that book. A book "On Writing Well" attracted me. I downloaded and started reading. Then, my unanswered questions about writing got answered.

In that book, Zinsser presents a tale of and Dr. Brock, a surgeon, discussing the writing with students at a school in Connecticut, USA. Zinsser and Dr. Brock were panelists. Students ask them "What is like to be a writer?" Dr. Brock answers writing as a matter of tremendous fun. For him, returning home from the hospital and going straight to write tensions away are routine activities. Words just flow. It is easy. But, to Zinsser, it is hard and lonely and words seldom just flow. A student again quiries whether writers rewrite what they write. Dr. Brock replies no need to rewrite. "Let all hang out", any form of sentence appear will reflect the writer in his natural form. However, Zinsser points out that professional writers rewrite their sentences over and over and then rewrite what they have written. Still, another question comes "What do they do when it is not going well?"  Dr. Brock replies hes just stops writing and put the work aside for a day when it goes better. But, Zinsser says the professional writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. Writing is a craft, not an art and the man who runs away from his craft beacuse he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke. Again, a student asks hem "What if you are feeling depressed or unhappy? Won't that affect?" Dr. Brock says probably it will. Go fishing. Take a walk. Probably it won't, Zinsser replies. If your job is to write every day, you learn to do it like any other job.

As Zinsser describes in his book, the writing is not an easy task. We should apply more effort to make it a craft. Whatever emotion comes through us, we should make daily routine of writing and stick to it, as a professional writer.