Review Book: How to write well. The Classic Guide for Nonfiction Writers by William Zinsser

 "A fundamental book for a generation of writers who want to know how to write a clean, irresistible picture." New York Times

How to write well. The classic guide for nonfiction writers is a book I recommend for those who are journalists, beginners, and already professional writers.

It helps and teaches you, and it can't help you better work on your texts.

I started reading this book and I haven't finished it yet. I wanted to understand the secrets of nonfunctional writing and discover myself as a writer, and learn a lot about how to write well and sell the book.

 One condition for being able to write really well is, surprisingly for many, the liberation from the "tyranny of the finished product." The writer is not interested in teaching writers how to sell, but how to write.

In his approach, the search for a meaning or an idea and the non-renunciation of the intention with which he set out to write a text are essential. The writer who respects these two coordinates could have the chance to have something to sell at the end of his approach. You must have something to convey to the reader in the hope that you will persuade him to read the text you have written.

Despite what some, and not a few, believe, nonfiction is literature. In other words, nonfiction is not an inferior species. Writing well about people, places, businesses, sports or science is an art that must be detached through a systematic effort.

The absence of this effort is the only way to a failure, as you do not master the subject on which you speak, as it is not enough to have a talent for writing.

The book does not end before offering some reflections on the relationship between the author and the book writer. The manuscript must sometimes be separate from the exercise of a book writer with different views or lower standards.

 

The author considers that "a good editor does not like anything more than a copy that does not need to be touched. A bad editor is obsessed with doing his job, thus proving that he has not forgotten the details of grammar and usage. pedant who noticed the asphalt potholes, not the landscape. "

The author of the book recommends that all those who write defend their text from changes that they perceive as inappropriate. To give in, without solid arguments, to adjustments imposed by the book editor, just so that the publisher does not get upset and the text no longer equates with the writer's acceptance of his humiliation. The author recounts his own experience, highlighting the tenacity with which he struggled for every point and for every comma in his texts.

In his opinion, the writer, after taking his talent as far as he was able, has to fulfill another important mission: to protect him from the unjustified interventions of some intermediaries who insinuate themselves along the way to the public.

I recommend that you read this book and polish yourself and become better than you are now.

                                                          Written by Boguș Elena