A Great Book For Medium Writers

It's not about Medium or even writing on the internet, but if you only ever read one book about writing, make it this one.

When William Zinsser ran his first writing class at Yale in 1971, they didn’t expect very many people to take the class. New teacher, new class. So they capped it at fifteen students to make sure it wouldn’t get canceled for lack of signups. Then one hundred and seventy people signed up to take the class. Surprise! lol.

John Rosenberg, editor of Harvard Magazine was one of the early students. Said his first few weeks in the class were almost traumatic.

That gives me pause, you know? Like, this guy who rose in the ranks to the position of editor at a very prestigious magazine was brought to his knees by what Zinsser was teaching in that class. Said he was gutted, but that class really shaped his voice.

I wrote about this book on Medium about four years ago. You can read it here, if you want. Thought I’d come back from a new angle. One that I didn’t see back when I first wrote about it. I didn’t run four different publications at that time, you know?

The stuff Zinsser teaches writers not to do, I see every day. Poured on with a hose in every post I reject and even sprinkled like salt and pepper on many of the posts I do accept. I’ll dive into that in a minute, but a little background if you’ll humor me.

Zinsser didn’t have powerfully magic connections. That happens a lot, you know? Like the Bezos story. Raised by a rich man, went to a prestigious college, rich connections with investment dollars and we pretend he’s a self made man. That was not William Zinsser. He literally worked his way up from the newsroom. Writing news stories, movie critiques and whatever the paper told him to write.

Eventually he got to the place he was flying around the world interviewing celebrities and covering the breaking news stories. Until the day Yale reached out to him. Said hey, Mr. Zinsser, can you teach students to do what you do?

He said I can give it a try. So they started small. Launched that first class with room for 15 students. And that’s when he found his real love, he said later. Teaching people to write, or to write a lot stronger than they already did.

Several years in, Yale had another question. Can you turn your class into a book? I can try, he said. It went bestseller. 1.5 million copies. First published in 1976, it was last reprinted in 2016 and is still in the top 10 at Amazon for writing books.

Here’s the top highlighted sentence on Kindle, which (incidentally) didn’t even exist when the book came out. 10,988 Kindle readers highlighted this one sentence:

the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components

Easier said than done. Because we lack the discretion to know what the cleanest components are in the first place. We get attached to our words.

***

Clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

Those are the four points Zinsser hammers in his book and class. But what strikes me is that they aren’t four separate concepts or fours separate mistakes so much as they are four different ways of looking at what’s wrong with a piece of clunky writing.

He tells the story of a student bringing him an eight page paper and telling him to go home and cut it in half. The student lost his mind a little and said I can’t. He said sorry, that’s the assignment. Cut it in half. And when the student brought it back, he’d turned a mediocre piece of writing into something really strong.

One thing Zinsser hammered is that most writers don’t realize how much excess has crept into their writing. They ramble. Write sentences that are too long and confusing. Fill their writing up with details that aren’t necessary to move the story forward. Add stuff that’s not relevant to the point, excess words and too much description.

It’s kind of the same point Antoine de Saint Exupery made decades before Zinsser when he observed that perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

I’ll try sum up his four points a little…

1. Clarity — is the meaning clear to your readers? Do they understand what you’re saying or have you left room for misinterpretation? He says if what you’re writing isn’t even clear to the reader, why bother writing it.

2. Simplicity — have you used the simplest words and sentences you possibly can? Simple language is the surest way to achieve clarity, he says.

3. Brevity — have you used the absolute minimum words needed? Not just in the story as a whole, but every paragraph, every sentence. Brevity is simplicity. Is there a shorter or simpler way to say what you’re saying?

4. Humanity — basically he says writing should respect the humanity of the reader. Don’t talk down to them, don’t put on airs, don’t make them wade through your posturing, lecturing, finger wagging or belly button gazing. Figure out what you’re trying to say and just say it. Write to express, not impress.

Here’s the perspective I lacked when I first wrote about his book four years ago. I didn’t run four publications. I’ve come to realize that topic matter really affects the ways writers will mess up.

For example, submissions for The Book Café and History of Women most often make mistakes #2 and #4. I’m astounded how many people can write an entire book review and never once show me what they felt or why. Or write about some woman like she’s being examined under a magnifying glass, a collection of facts with little or no emotion present at all. They write like they’re still writing to impress some teacher instead of expressing something real and genuine to the reader.

People writing personal pieces for On Reflection or The Interstitial are more likely to make mistakes #1 and #3. A whole ton of rambling but if they have a point, I can’t find it. I don’t know what they’re trying to say. It’s like they shoved a day or an event or a feeling under that same magnifying glass and they’re so full of descriptive words that the meaning gets lost and I don’t know what the point is. You know?

Here’s a sobering fact for writers. Only 14% of Americans read at high school or higher literacy rates. Sure, literacy is at all all time high. But 82% of readers are reading at grade school reading levels.

And I’m not saying dumb down your writing. Not much humanity in that, writing with the assumption the reader is half illiterate. What I am saying is there aren’t many writers who can’t learn something from what Zinsser teaches.

First time I read this book I stopped writing for months. I like to think I came back stronger. Love to know what you think if you’ve read it. :)

---