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ON WRITING WELL
“Why Write How You Talk” is Bad Advice: Here’s What Has Worked for My Writing Style
How to develop your writing style(voice) according to William Zinsser
No piece of writing advice has been abused like William Zinsser’s advice on how to find your writing style.
“Never say anything in writing that you wouldn’t comfortably say in a conversation,” he writes.
“If you’re not a person who says ‘indeed’ or ‘moreover’, or calls someone an individual (‘he’s a fine individual’), please don’t write it.” — William Zinsser
Word on the street is, “We should ‘write how we talk’”.
Fifty years after Mr. Zinsser’s book, On Writing Well — the bible on writing good nonfiction — was published, that statement is what his advice has morphed into.
As far as my writing style is concerned, nothing has confused me like that blasphemy of a sentence.
I’m a non-native English speaker living in a remote village in a third-world country. No one I talk to, daily, speaks English.
