Zinsser on clutter
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
Zinsser's diagnosis of bad non-fiction is one word, clutter: the unnecessary word, the long word that is no better than the short one, the phrase that announces what is about to be said, the qualifier that hedges a claim the writer has not decided to make. His cure is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components, and he is specific about what goes. Adverbs that repeat the verb. Prepositions hung on verbs that do not need them. Inflated phrases where a single short word would do.
The part that goes deeper than style is his account of where clutter comes from. Clear writing follows from clear thinking, and a muddled sentence usually means the writer does not yet know what they want to say. So revision is how the thinking gets finished, and it would be wrong to call it polish. He says plainly that writing is hard, that a clear sentence is no accident, and that rewriting is where most of the work happens.
Two more ideas I kept. The reader is someone with a short attention span and many other things to do, who owes the writer nothing. And the writer's real product is themselves: readers stay for a person, so the stripped sentence should still sound like someone.
✨KEY IDEAS
Most first drafts can lose half their words and say more.
Clutter is a symptom: the fog is in the head before it is on the page.
He marks surplus words by bracketing them, so the writer can see the sentence stand without them.
The opening must earn the next sentence, and that one the next.
Simplifying is not flattening: the voice has to survive the cuts.
📝READING NOTES
Paraphrase, not quotation. Bought at Folio Books, read 27 October to 8 November. I skipped the chapters on sports and travel writing.
What I was doing wrong
I had been editing for length. Zinsser edits for decision. A sentence with somewhat, arguably and in some ways is not too long. It is undecided. Cutting the words forces the question of whether I believe it.
His method as I now run it
- Draft without stopping.
- Leave it a day.
- Bracket everything that does no work: throat-clearing, repeated ideas, adverbs, the sentence explaining the previous sentence.
- Read it aloud without the bracketed words.
- Put back only what is missed.
On three drafts in a row the same thing came out in brackets: the entire first paragraph. I had been warming up in public. That is 📝 Issue 51 - Cut the first paragraph.
Where I differ
- He is suspicious of every qualifier. I write about statistics. Some of my hedges are the content: probably, about, in this sample. An interval is not clutter. His rule needs an exception for uncertainty that has been measured.
- Plain is a style too. His own prose is plain in a particular mid-century American way, and it is a taste. Dressed up as a law, it would flatten writers I like.
- He says to write for yourself. Half right. I write for one reader I can picture, which is usually Noor with a pen.
- The later chapters on specific forms have dated. The first seven have not.
Where it went
- 💎 Clutter is a failure of thinking before it is a failure of style, new.
- 💎 Writing is how I find out whether I understand, which I already had from 📖 Bacon on studies and which Zinsser turns from a remark into a procedure.
- The strategy section of ♦️ Writing clearly now names him.
- Next: reread Orwell's essay, which he leans on. See 📖 Orwell on stale language.
Editing checklist
- Done: Bracket the first paragraph and read the piece without it
- Done: Strike every adverb that repeats its verb
- Done: Keep hedges only where the uncertainty is real and stated
- Still open: Read the last sentence: does it end, or does it summarise
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : On Writing Well, William Zinsser, the opening chapters on simplicity, clutter and rewriting
- Zinsser argues that : good non-fiction is made by removing everything that does no work, and that this is an act of thinking
- by stating that : clutter comes from not knowing what one means, the reader has no patience to spare, and rewriting is where a sentence is made clear while keeping the writer's own voice