I was thinking of The Elements of Style.
I asked ChatGPT for suggestions to get deeper into the craft of writing. To its credit, none of its recommendations were hallucinated—I double-checked—but instead of that quintessential instructional manual, it pointed me to another classic: On Writing Well by William Zinsser.
Zinsser was a professor, freelance writer, literary critic, and the author of almost 20 nonfiction titles. On Writing Well was his most famous work, initially published in the 70s but constantly revised; the version I read was a special 30th edition, republished in 2006. His tenure as a writer overlapped with, in hindsight, a golden period of long-form writing.
It was a time when published writing was in high demand: newspapers, magazines, coffee-table books, etc. The format favored prose that filled space, that grabbed the reader who already held the physical pages and was ready to spend quality reading time. Accordingly, it was possible and valuable to spend the effort, the hours, to revise a single sentence to draw readers into the narrative. Contrast that attention to detail with the internet and the advent of short-term, social-media-style posts; the speed of communication rewards quantity over quality.
Thankfully, most of the advice in On Writing Well stays timelessly relevant. Like The Elements of Style, the initial topics covered here revolve around writing clearly and simply. The way to get there is by subtraction, revision, and removing clutter from the prose. I remember learning this simple lesson back in high school English1, but the hard part was always in doing the deed. I felt absolutely wasteful when contemplating throwing away phrases, paragraphs, pages of text. But of course, Zinsser was right—the writing is much better when it’s more concise.
Another piece of advice is to write for yourself. It’s to avoid playing up to an imaginary audience, or adopting a novel voice for some sense of literary elegance or posture. I struggle with this, often lapsing into an overly formal or academic style that I think sounds smart, but usually ends up muddling the point. The goal is to stay true and honest to myself, and avoid projecting the airs of a disembodied, ornate “writer.” Getting this right sets the foundation of a literary voice.
That’s not to say that the book is perfect. His tone comes off curmudgeonly in some chapters, with more “old man yelling at clouds” than “wisdom passed down through the ages” energy. In one instance, he talks about his involvement on the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary‘s debut, to gauge the inclusion of common words like “prioritize” and “personality” into its first edition. The exercise whiffs of fashionable elitism, a bunch of grizzled writers determining whether natural language evolution is deemed valid.
Beyond writing philosophy, I enjoyed just how much emphasis the author places on the texture of prose, a maniacal focus that I have not encountered elsewhere. A self-described “word freak,” Zinsser spent multiple chapters opining on rhythm, word choice, diction, punctuation, and all the little pieces that go into each sentence. This is how you can spend an hour refining and rewriting a single sentence in the middle of a paragraph halfway through a print article: by caring about the precise placement, usage, and impact of every single word.
Altogether, my main takeaway from On Writing Well was that I didn’t know what great writing read like. Yes, famous quotes are examples of great language, but it’s a much harder task to construct excellent writing spanning paragraphs of text2. Great writing is about both the grandiose ideas it imparts, but also the minute details of how it communicates those thoughts. I needed explicit examples and pointers to appreciate the difference.
This is still encouragingly relevant, two decades after his 30th-edition revisions. The standards of literary excellence Zinsser lays out help explain why AI-generated text reads blandly. LLMs are amazing in producing grammatically perfect sentences, better than most writers’ rough drafts. For corporate communications and quick-hitting online content, their neutrality and speed are major advantages. But, in the handful of instances where crafted prose matters, the AI text clears the low bar and stays down there.
The text lacks that sense of voice and tone and texture.
It hasn’t been deleted and rewritten half a dozen times.
It doesn’t embody that craftsmanship of writing.
After all, the title of the book is not On Writing Competently; it’s On Writing Well.
