Qualities Of Becoming A Good Writer English Research Paper Help essay writing 6-7 pages includes cover page APA stylesimple and high school level clear ide

Qualities Of Becoming A Good Writer English Research Paper Help essay writing 6-7 pages includes cover page APA stylesimple and high school level clear ideas it must be perfect all details will be provided in the attachment Simplicity
WILLIAM ZINSSER
Born in New York City in 1922, William Zinsser was educated at Prince-
ton University. After serving in the Army in World War II, he worked
at the New York Herald Tribune as an editor, writer, and critic. During
the 1970s he taught a popular course in nonfiction at Yale University,
and from 1979 to 1987 he was general editor of the Book-of-the-Month
Club. Zinsser has written more than a dozen books, including The City
Dwellers (1962), Pop Goes America (1966), and Spring Training (1989),
and three widely used books on writing: Writing with a Word Processor
(1983), Writing to Learn (1993), and On Writing Well (2006). Currently,
he teaches journalism at Columbia University, and his freelance writing
regularly appears in some of our leading magazines.
The following selection is taken from On Writing Well. This
book grew out of Zinsser’s many years of experience as a professional
writer and teacher. In this essay, Zinsser exposes what he believes is the
writer’s number one problem—“clutter.” He sees Americans “strangling
in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and mean-
ingless jargon.” His solution is simple: Writers must know what they want
to say and must be thinking clearly as they start to compose. Then self-
discipline and hard work are necessary to achieve clear, simple prose. No
matter what your experience as a writer has been, you will find Zinsser’s
observations sound and his advice practical.
WRITING TO DISCOVER: Some people view writing as “thinking on paper.”
They believe that by seeing something written on a page they are better able to
“see what they think.” Write about the relationship, for you, between writing and
thinking. Are you one of those people who likes to “see” ideas on paper while trying
to work things out? Or do you like to think through ideas before writing about them?
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling
in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaning-
less jargon.
Who can understand the clotted language of everyday American com-
merce: the memo, the corporation report, the business letter, the notice
from the bank explaining its latest “simplified” statement? What member
of an insurance or medical plan can decipher the brochure explaining his
costs and benefits? What father or mother can put together a child’s toy
from the instructions on the box? Our national tendency is to inflate and
thereby sound important. The airline pilot who announces that he is pre-
sently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn’t think
201
202
WRITERS ON WRITING
of saying it may rain. The sentence is too simple—there must be some-
thing wrong with it.
But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its clean-
he
est components. Every word that serves no function, every long word
that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning
that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader
unsure of who is doing what-these are the thousand and one adulterants
that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in propor-
tion to education and rank.
During the 1960s the president of my university wrote a letter to mol-
lify the alumni after a spell of campus unrest. “You are probably aware,
began, “that we have been experienc-
Clear thinking becomes clear
ing very considerable potentially
writing; one can’t exist without
explosive expressions of dissatisfaction
the other
on issues only partially related.” He
meant that the students had been has-
sling them about different things. I was far more upset by the president’s
English than by the students’ potentially explosive expressions of dissatis-
faction. I would have preferred the presidential approach taken by Frank-
lin D. Roosevelt when he tried to convert into English his own
government’s memos, such as this blackout order of 1942:
Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all
Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal
government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by
reason of internal or external illumination,
5
“Tell them,” Roosevelt said, “that in buildings where they have to
keep the work going to put something across the windows.”
Simplify, simplify. Thoreau said it, as we are so often reminded, and
no American writer more consistently practiced what he preached. Open
Walden to any page and you will find a man saying in a plain and orderly
way what is on his mind:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter?
The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear
writing; one can’t exist without the other. It’s impossible for a muddy
thinker to write good English. He may get away with it for a paragraph or
two, but soon the reader will be lost, and there’s no sin so grave, for the
reader will not easily be lured back.
Who is this elusive creature, the reader? (The reader is someone with
an attention span of about 30 seconds — a person assailed by many
forces
competing for attention. At one time those forces were relatively few:
WILLIAM ZINSSER: Simplicity
203
–
newspapers, magazines, radio, spouse, children, pets. Today they also
include a galaxy of electronic devices for receiving entertainment and
e-mail, cell phones, BlackBerries, iPods — as well as a fitness program,
information — television, VCRs, DVDs, CDs, video games, the Internet,
woman snoozing in a chair with a magazine or a book is a person who
was
pace
10
a pool, a lawn and that most potent of competitors, sleep. The man or
being given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer.
It won’t do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep
with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it’s usually because
the writer hasn’t been careful enough. That carelessness can take any
number of forms. Perhaps a sentence is so excessively cluttered that
the reader, hacking through the verbiage, simply doesn’t know what
it means. Perhaps a sentence has been so shoddily constructed that the
reader could read it in several ways. Perhaps the writer has switched pro-
nouns in mid-sentence, or has switched tenses, so the reader loses track
of who is talking or when the action took place. Perhaps Sentence B is
not a logical sequel to Sentence A; the writer, in whose head the con-
nection is clear, hasn’t bothered to provide the missing link. Perhaps the
writer has used a word incorrectly by not taking the trouble to look it up.
Faced with such obstacles, readers are at first tenacious. They blame
themselves—they obviously missed something, and they go back over the
mystifying sentence, or over the whole paragraph, piecing it out like an
ancient rune, making guesses and moving on. But they won’t do that for
long. The writer is making them work too hard, and they will look for one
who is better at the craft.
Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say:) Sur-
prisingly often they don’t know. Then they must look at what they have
written and ask: have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the
subject for the first time? If it’s not, some fuzz has worked its way into
the machinery. The clear writer is someone clearheaded enough to see this
stuff for what it is: fuzz.
I don’t mean that some people are born clearheaded and are therefore
natural writers, whereas others are naturally fuzzy and will never write
well. Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on them-
selves, as if they were working on any other project that requires logic:
making a shopping list or doing an algebra problem. Good writing doesn’t
come naturally, though most people seem to think it does Professional
writers are constantly bearded by people who say they’d like to “try a little
writing sometime”—meaning when they retire from their real profession,
like insurance or real estate, which is hard. Or they say, “I could write a
book about that.” I doubt it.
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sen-
tences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember
this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it
is hard.
WRITERS ON WRITING
Learning to write well is a demanding and difficult pursuit, but the
ability to express exactly what you mean is one of the most enjoyable and
rewarding skills you can possess. And, as with any sought-after goal, there
is plenty of help available for the aspiring writer. In this chapter, we have
and respected teachers of writing.
gathered some of the best of that advice, offered by professional writers
The essays included in this chapter are based on current research and
thinking on how writers go about their work. We begin with best-selling
author Stephen King’s “Reading to Write,” wherein he supports the need
to be an active and critical reader, much as we have done in Chapter 1,
if you wish to become an effective writer. The rest of the essays in this sec-
tion look more deeply into the writer’s tool bag. Linda Flower analyzes
what we mean by audience: “The goal of the writer is to create a momen-
tary common ground between the reader and the writer.” She explains
that in order to communicate effectively writers should know as much
about their readers’ knowledge, attitudes, and needs as possible. Popular
novelist and teacher of writing Anne Lamott recognizes that even though
writers may start out with firm purpose and clear thinking, rough drafts
are inevitably messy affairs. In “The Maker’s Eye: Revising Your Own
Manuscripts,” the late Donald M. Murray recognizes the need to produce
a first draft, no matter how messy, so as to move to the real job of writing.
For him, as for almost all practicing writers, writing is revising. Next, we
offer another take on the need to achieve clarity in your writing. In his
essay “Simplicity,” one of America’s leading experts on writing, William
Zinsser, offers the following support: “Writing is hard work. A clear sen-
tence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or
even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that
writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.” Finally, a video with Stephen King
Amis (available online at bedfordstmartins.com/languageawareness/
epages) shows the renowned author discussing the importance of reading
widely and writing constantly in a talk at Yale University. All these writing
experts are worth reading not just once but again and again as you develop
your own skills, confidence, and authority as a writer.
177
during
penny
that th
about
Only !
thin cl
Reading to Write
STEPHEN KING
or so
)
??
word
with 2
cha
with
large-
literar
used t
A
an im
Born in 1947) Stephen King is a 1970 graduate of the University of
Maine. He worked as a janitor in a knitting mill, a laundry worker, and
a high school English teacher before he struck it big with his writing.
Today, many people consider King’s name synonymous with the macabre;
he is, beyond dispute, the most successful writer of horror fiction today.
He has written dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, ?novel-
las, and screenplays, among other works. His books have sold well over
300 million copies worldwide, and many of his novels have been made
into popular motion pictures, including Stand by Me, Misery, The Green
Mile, and Dreamcatcher. His fiction, starting with Carrie in 1974, includes
Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Dead Zone (1979), Christine
(1983), Pet Sematary (1983), The Dark Half(1989), The Girl Who Loved
Tom Gordon (1999), From a Buick 8 (2002), Everything’s Eventual: Five
Dark Tales (2002), The Colorado Kid (2005), Cell (2006), Lisey’s Story
(2006), Duma Key (2008), Under the Dome (2009), 11/22/63 (2011),
The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012), and Mile 81 (2012). Other works
include Danse Macabre (1980), a nonfiction look at horror in the media,
and On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000).
In the following passage taken from On Writing, King discusses the
importance of reading in learning to write. Reading, in his words, “offers
you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what
hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there
dying (or dead) on the page.
losing
writer
he/sh
better
than :
aging
realiz
actual
C
novel
The I
a goc
WRITING TO DISCOVER: In your opinion, are reading and writing connected in
some way? If the two activities are related, what is the nature of that relationship?
you have to be a reader to be a good writer, or is writing an activity that can be
learned quite apart from reading?
style,
acter:
write
Do
be al
such
and
great
sary
of yo
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others:
Read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that
I’m aware of, no shortcut.
I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a
year, mostlfiction I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because
I like to read. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Simi-
larly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because
I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick
up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more
to teach than the good ones.
When I was in the eighth grade, I happened upon a paperback novel
by Murray Leinster, a science fictiom pulp writer who did most of his work
expe
into
mea:
can
ther
178
like

Purchase answer to see full
attachment