Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William ZinsserWriting is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.
William ZinsserFinding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn't much help-taste is a quality so intangible that it can't even be defined. But we know it when we meet it.
William ZinsserOne of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
William ZinsserUltimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
William ZinsserThe secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning thatโs already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing whatโthese are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.
William Zinsser