On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction

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3 Sentence Summary

Learn how to employ good English to the task of persuasive nonfiction writing. Like a carpenter who first learns to saw wood neatly before he bevels the edges, writing is a craft based on certain principles that build upon one another. On Writing Well is a master class on how to become a better writer, clearer thinker, and stronger communicator.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Writing is strongest when it’s simple and clear of clutter.
2. Make every sentence do useful work.
3. Always be yourself. Warmth and humanity are the two most important qualities of good nonfiction writing.
4. Leave the reader with one provocative thought that he didn’t have before. Just one.
5. Understated humor is the nonfiction writer’s secret weapon.

On Writing Well Summary

1. The Transaction

• Writers sell themselves, not their subject. We read with interest because of the writer’s own enthusiasm for his field.
• The two most important qualities of good nonfiction writing is humanity and warmth.
• Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next.
• Learn to use the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest strength and the least clutter.

2. Simplicity

• Clutter is the disease of American writing.
• Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important.
• But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.

• Clear thinking becomes clear writing: one can’t exist without the other.
• Don’t bore the reader with clutter. The man snoozing in his chair with an unfinished magazine open on his lap is a man who was being given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer.
• If a reader is lost, it is generally because the writer has not been careful enough to keep him on the path.
• The writer must constantly ask himself: What am I trying to say? Have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time?
• Many writers can’t stand to throw anything away. Their sentences are littered with words that mean essentially the same thing and with phrases which make a point that is implicit in what they have already said.
• Think about every sentence. Think about every word.

3. Clutter

• Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there.
• Clutter is the laborious phrase which has pushed out the short word that means the same thing.

• Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, a salesman into a marketing representative, a dumb kid into an underachiever, and a bad kid into a pre-delinquent.
• Clutter is the official language used by the American corporation to hide its mistakes.
• Clutter is the language of the Pentagon throwing dust in the eyes of the populace by calling an invasion a “reinforced protective reaction strike.”

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible…Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

George Orwell

• Beware of the long word that is not better than the short word.
• Beware of the new fad words for which the language already has equivalents.
• Be grateful for everything you can throw away.
• Re-examine each sentence that you put on paper. Is every word doing new and useful work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful?

4. Style

• Few people realize how badly they write. You have to strip down your writing to the essentials before you can build it back up.
• First learn to hammer in the nails, and if what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength.
• Style is organic to the person doing the writing.
• Therefore a fundamental rule is: always be yourself.
• Style is who you are.
• You must relax and be confident in your writing.
• A writer is most natural and relaxed when he is writing in the first person. Writing is, after all, a personal transaction between two people.
• Use “I” and “me” and “we” and “us”.
• Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

5. The Audience

• Who are you writing for? You are writing for yourself.
• Don’t imagine writing to a large audience or editorial board.
• You are writing primarily to entertain yourself, and if you go about it with confidence you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.

6. Words

• You will never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive.
• The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original.
• In learning to write nonfiction, make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. But cultivate the best writers.
• Use a dictionary.
• If there’s any doubt what a word means, look it up. Learn its etymology and notice what curious branches its original root has put forth.
• Master the small gradations between words that seem to be synonyms.
• Bear in mind, when you are choosing words and stringing them together, how they sound. Rhythm and alliteration are vital to every sentence.
• Read your sentences aloud.
• See if you can gain variety by reversing the order of a sentence, by substituting a word that has freshness or oddity, by altering the length of your sentences.

7. Usage

• The laws of usage are relative, bending with the taste of the lawmakers.
• The spoken language is always looser than the written language.
• The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.

Part 2

8. Unity

• You learn to write by writing.
• The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
• All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem. It may be a problem of where to obtain the facts, or how to organize the material. It may be a problem of approach or attitude, tone or style. Whatever it is, it has to be confronted and solved.
• Strive for freshness above all in your writing.
• Unity is the anchor of good writing.
• One choice is unity of pronoun. Are you going to write in the first person, or as a participant, or as an observer?
• Another choice of unity is tense. Are you going to write in the past or present tense? Do not switch back and forth unintentionally.
• Another choice of unity is mood. Don’t mix two or three.

• Decide what corner of your subject you are going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop.
• Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he didn’t have before. Just one.
• Don’t ever become the prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints—it is too subjective a process, too full of surprises.
• Scissors and paste are honorable writers’ tools.

9. The Lead

• The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it does not induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead.
• The lead must capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading. It must cajole him with freshness or novelty or paradox, or with humor, or with surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question.
• Then the lead must provide a few hard details that tell the reader why the piece was written and why he ought to read it.
• Every paragraph should amplify the one that preceded it.
• Take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph—it is the crucial springboard to the next paragraph. Try to give that sentence an extra twist of humor or surprise. Make the reader smile and you’ve got him for at least one more paragraph.
• Always collect more material than you will eventually use. You never know which detail will make for a good lead. Every article is strong in proportion to the surplus of detail from which you can choose the few that will serve you best.

10. The Ending

• An article that doesn’t stop at its proper stopping place is suddenly a drag and therefore, ultimately, a failure.
• Don’t end by repeating in compressed form what you have already told the reader in detail.
• The perfect ending should take the reader slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right to him.
• When you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point that you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
• Quotations often make a fine ending. Look for some remark which has a sense of finality, or which is funny, or which adds an unexpected last detail.
• Surprise is one of the most refreshing commodities in nonfiction.
• There is nothing like human detail to make a story come alive.

11. The Interview

• Get people talking.
• Ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives.
• His own words will always be better than your words.
• Whatever form of nonfiction you write, it will come alive in proportion to the number of “quotes” that you can weave into it naturally as you go along.
• Always look for the human element.
• The basic tools for an interview are paper and two or three well-sharpened pencils. Don’t rely on a tape recorder.
• Keep your notebook or paper out of sight until you need it. There is nothing less likely to relax a person than the arrival of someone with a stenographer’s pad.
• Start with small talk. The first step is to establish trust.
• Never go into an interview without doing whatever homework you can. You will be resented if you inquire about facts that you could have learned in advance.
• Make a list of likely questions—it will save you the vast embarrassment of going dry in mid-interview.
• Don’t fear invading their privacy. Most people are delighted that someone cares to ask them about their life.
• Never hesitate to ask the interviewee to pause until you catch up writing.
• As soon as the interview is over, fill in all the missing words that you can remember.
• When you get home, type out your notes so that you can read them easily.
• Single out the quotations that are the most important or colorful.
• Your responsibility as a writer is brevity and fair play. You can cut and paste what someone has said as long as you represent their position accurately.
• Your first obligation is to the person you gave the interview and to his version of the story. After that your duty is to the reader. He deserves the smallest package.
• Don’t change any words or let the cutting of a sentence distort the proper context of what remains.
• The lead should tell the reader, like all leads, why the person is worth reading about. What is his claim to our time and attention?
• Quotations are livelier when you break them up, making periodic appearances in your role as guide.
• When you use a quotation, start the sentence with it.
• Don’t strain to find synonyms for “he said.”

12. Travel

• Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels. he enjoyed his trip so much that he wants to tell us all about it—and “all” is what we don’t want to hear.
• The mere agglomeration of detail does not spark interest in the reader. The detail must in some way be significant.
• Avoid soft words which under hard examination mean nothing, or which mean different things to different people. Words like: “attractive,” “charming,” and “romantic.”
• Choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion. It’s probably a bored cliche.
• Eliminate every fact that is a known detail: don’t tell us that the sea had waves and that the sand was white. Find details that are significant.
• Make sure the details do useful work.

13. Bits & Pieces

Verbs

• Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around using a passive verb.
• Active verbs push your story along with confidence. Passive verbs tug fitfully.
• Short is generally better than long.
• Don’t go Latin if a simple Anglo-Saxon word will do.
• Find verbs that are bright with color. Don’t use one that is dull or merely serviceable.

Adverbs

• Most adverbs are unnecessary.
• You will clutter your sentence and annoy the reader if you choose a verb that has a precise meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning. E.g. The radio blared loudly. She clenched her teeth tightly.
• Self-sufficient verbs are weakened by redundant adverbs.

Adjectives

• Most adjectives are also unnecessary.
• Adjectives that exist solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader. E.g. Precipitous cliff. Lacy spiderweb. Friendly smiles.
• Make your adjectives do work that needs to be done.

Little Qualifiers

• Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: “a bit,” “a little,” “sort of,” “kind of,” “rather,” “quite.” They dilute both your style and your persuasiveness.
• Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
• Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of trust on the part of the reader.

Punctuation

The Period

• If you find yourself hopelessly mired in a long sentence, it’s probably because you are trying to make the sentence do more than it can reasonably do.
• There is no minimum length for a sentence that is acceptable in the eyes of man and God.
• If you want to write long sentences, you have to be a genius.

The Exclamation Point

• Don’t use it unless you must to achieve a certain effect.
• Instead, construct your sentence so that the order of the words will put the emphasis where you want it.
• Resist using the exclamation point to notify the reader that you are making a joke or being ironic.
• Humor is best achieved by understatement, and there’s nothing subtle about an exclamation point.

The Semicolon

• You might use it to balance a pro and con.
• The semicolon is old fashioned and is often better replaced by a period or dash.

The Dash

• Use it to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought that you have stated in the first part.
  • “We decided to keep going—it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner.”
• Use two dashes to set apart a parenthetical thought within a larger sentence.
  • “She told me to get in the car—she had been after me all summer to have a haircut—and we drove silently into town.

The colon

• Serves well as a lead in to a quotation or itemized list.

Mood Changers

• Alert the reader as early as possible in a sentence to any change in mood from the previous sentence.
• “But” is a fantastic way to start a sentence to notify a change in direction.
• Look for all the places where on of these short words (“but,” “however,” “yet”) will quickly convey the same mood and meaning as a long and dismal clause.

Contractions

• Your style will be warmer and truer to your personality by using contractions.
• There are no rules against informality.
• Trust your ear and your instincts.

Overstatement and Credibility

• Don’t overstate.
• Let humor sneak up so that we hardly hear it coming.
• Don’t inflate an incident to make it more flamboyant or bizarre than it actually was.

Concept Nouns

• Nouns that express a concept are commonly used in bad writing instead of verbs that tell what somebody did.
• Beware of sentences without a working verb—only “is” or “isn’t”
• Get people doing things.
• Avoid nouns that are impersonal and embody vague concepts.

Paragraphs

• Keep your paragraphs short.
• Short paragraphs make your text look inviting to read.
• Generally aim for 2-3 sentences.

The Subconscious Mind

• Your subconscious mind does more writing than you think.
• Often you will spend a whole day trying to fight your way out of some verbal thicket in which you seem to be tangled beyond salvation. Surprisingly often a solution will occur to you the next morning when you plunge back in.
• Stay alert. Trust your subconscious mind to work for you.

14. Science

• The reader knows nothing.
• You can’t assume that people know what you think any boob knows, or that they still remember what has once been explained to them.
• Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons. First it forces you to makes sure that you know how it works. Then it forces you to make sure that the reader will understand it as clearly as you do.
• Lead a reader who knows nothing, step by step, to a grasp of the subject.
• Imagine writing science as an upside down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact that a reader must know before he can learn any more. Then build from there.
• You can take much of the mystery out of science writing by helping the reader to identify with the scientific work being done. The best way is to look for the human element.
• One human element is yourself. Use your own experience to connect the reader to some mechanism that also touches his life.
• Another method is to weave a scientific story around someone else.
• Another way of helping the reader to understand unfamiliar scientific facts is to relate them to sights that he is familiar with. Reduce the abstract principle to an image that he can visualize.
• With every hard principle give a simple illustration.
• Write like a person and not like a scientist.
• Only through clear writing can the rest of us ponder our future and make educated choices in areas where we have little or no education.

15. Sports

• Avoid writing in sports English. Write with good English.
• Avoid the exhausted synonym and strive for freshness elsewhere in the construction of a sentence.
• Never be afraid to repeat a player’s name and to keep the details of the game simple. A set or an inning doesn’t have to be recycled into a stanza or a frame just to avoid redundancy. The cure is worse than the ailment.
• These are the values to look for when you write about sport: people, places, the link between past and present, the tug of the future.

16. Criticism

• Think what you would want to know if you had to spend the money for the movie, the baby-sitter and the long-promised dinner at a good restaurant.
• The critic should love the medium that he is reviewing.
• Don’t give away too much of the plot. Tell the reader just enough to let him decide whether it’s the kind of story that he tends to enjoy, but not so much that you will kill his eventual enjoyment.
• Use as much specific detail as possible.
• Avoid dealing in generalities which mean nothing.
• Don’t describe what you experienced. Give real examples.
• If you want to be a critic, steep yourself in the literature of the medium that you hope to make your province.
• Only then can you place every new drama within an older tradition, recognize the genius when it comes along and tell the pioneer from the imitator.

17. Humor

• Humor is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer.
• Humor is a national asset is forcing the country to see itself clearly.
• The heightening of some crazy truth—to a level where it will be seen as crazy—is at the heart of what the serious humorist is trying to do.
• Humor jolts you into looking with a fresh eye at something ludicrous in our daily environment that was previously taken for granted.
• Control is vital to humor. Learnt to throw away more laughs than you keep.
• Trust the sophistication of the readers who do know what you’re doing, and don’t worry about the rest.
• Today in America the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it really is still outlandish.
• “I’m here and I’m involved”—make this your creed if you seriously want to write serious humor. The humorist operates on a deeper current than most people suspect. He must not only make a strong point; he must be willing to go against the grain, to state what the populace and the Presidents may not want to hear.
• It is a lonely and perilous calling. No other kind of writer risks his neck so visibly or so often on the high wire of public approval. it is the thinnest wire in all nonfiction, and the humorist knows that he will frequently fall off. Yet he is in dead earnest, this acrobat bobbing over our heads, trying to startle us with nonsense into seeing our lives with sense.

Sources

Read the best to write like the best. Here’s a list of authors and journalists whose work is used as examples throughout the book.

• E. B. White
• H. L. Mencken
• Hunter S. Thompson
• Paul O’Neil
• Garry Wills
• Richard Burton
• Joseph Mitchell
• Joan Didion
• Alfred Kazin
• Alan Moorehead
• V. S. Pritchett
• Norman Mailer
• Will Bradbury
• Berton Roueché
• Moshe Safdie
• Loren Eiseley
• Lewis Thomas
• René Dubos
• Red Smith
• Jean Shepherd
• James Agee
• Michael J. Arlen
• Virgil Thomson
• Michael Rosenthal

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