Writing to Learn

For people who care about good writing, writing to learn is an admirable guide on how to write clearly about any subject ranging from art and music to physics and chemistry. Valuable book.

For the writer in you

Gut

Among the useful things I took away from this Zinsser text are the following:• “Writing is a form of thinking, whatever the subject…”• “Every discipline has a literature…”• “Clear writing is the logical arrangement of thought; a scientist who thinks clearly can write as well as the best writer…”• “Writing and thinking and learning were the same process..”• “Learning, he seemed to be saying, takes a multitude of forms; expect to find them in places where you least expect them…”• “Along the way I’ve also discovered that knowledge is not as compartmentalized as I thought it was. Hermes and the periodic table are equally its household gods, and writing is the key that opens the door…”• “Motivation is crucial to writing – students will write far more willingly if they write about subjects that interest them and that they have an aptitude for…”• “Writing is learned by imitation…”• “…the essence of writing is rewriting…”• “A piece of writing must be viewed as a constantly evolving organism…”• “Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts…”• “ Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow…”• “… writing is linear and sequential…”• “Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not infrequently found together and it is seldom easy to distinguish between the first two…” I find this observation that Zinsser took from The Birth of the Republic particularly reassuring in light of our contemporary ‘hair-on-fire’ news wherein everything is unprecedented and worse than we have ever known!• “Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. It’s a physical activity, unlike reading…”• “…the act of writing will summon from the buried past exactly what we need exactly when we need it. Memory intuition and chance associations will always generate a certain percentage of what any writer writes. The remainder is generated by reason.”• “…there are two kinds of writing: explanatory writing that transmits existing information or ideas… and exploratory writing that enables us to discover what we want to say…”Zinsser provides separate chapters with examples of clear, concise, and illuminating writing from a variety of different disciplines. His specific examples were not as important, to me, as the generic notion that good writing can explore and explain every discipline of thinking. I recommend this book to thinkers, whether they choose to become writers, or not.

This book is a wonderful guide to what is excellent writing across all disciplines. Great examples of what makes engaging writing. Already I am starting to notice an improvement in my own writing. Zinsser is full of great advice. Highly recommend for anyone who would like to improve their writing.