Ep. #907: Book Club: My Top 5 Takeaways from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Hey, and hello. I am Mike Matthews. This is Muscle for Life. Thank you for joining me today for an installment in a series that you might have thought was dead, that I might have given up on, but I haven’t. And that is Book Club. I have not recorded one of these episodes in some time, not because I haven’t been reading.

But I just haven’t made the time to do one of these episodes. I really don’t have an excuse. But here I am reviving the book club. The book club will go on. I do want to get back to one episode per month is what I was doing for some time. And that gives me enough time to read stuff and pull all of my highlights and notes and think about them and create one of these episodes.

And so This episode is on the book On Writing and I wanted to produce this one because I am asked fairly often for book recommendations for many things really, but writing is a common one and this is always on the list if you have not read On Writing and you do any writing of any kind, doesn’t have to be professional writing.

If you just want to be able to write better, and really what that means is if you want to be able to think better and communicate better, because that’s all writing really is. You are thinking on paper. And if you can write better, you will also be able to speak better. And so if any of that is of any interest to you, then I think you’re going to this episode, and I think you are going to like On Writing oh, and I haven’t mentioned the author’s name yet, William Zinsser. Before we begin, many people think that if they just eat well, if they eat enough nutritious foods, they don’t need books. a multivitamin. And while there is truth there, we don’t need to take any supplements, but the right ones can help us achieve our fitness and our health goals faster.

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Okay, let’s get to my top five takeaways from the book. The first one is quote, look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Re examine each sentence you put on paper. And my note here is, great writing is always the result of ruthless rewriting, of reviewing every word to ensure that it’s doing new work, and reviewing every sentence and every passage and every paragraph to find tighter ways to communicate your thoughts, better And to shed language, that’s faddish and frilly.

So always collect and create more material than you’ll use, because then you’ll have a surplus to work from that will allow you to select only. The best stuff, only the stuff that will best serve your needs. If you start with too little, you can be resistant to ruthlessly pruning your writing because you might not have much left afterward.

For example, Zinsser mentions that 50 percent of a first draft can probably just be eliminated with good editing. Then make sure that your first draft contains enough material to give you the emotional freedom to maybe remove half of it. Okay, key takeaway number two, readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine.

Therefore, a fundamental rule is be yourself. So my note here is the most valuable commodity that you have as a writer is just you, your whole unique combination of experiences, observations, attitudes, feelings, ideas, and that is your voice. Therefore, you should always write with that voice regardless of the topic and always look to amplify that voice rather than stifle it.

Okay, takeaway number three, quote, you’ll 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. So my note is, the hack merely rents and then returns lumps of language without even processing them. Like they’re just Taco Bell.

But the accomplished writer treats words in the same way as the certified sommelier treats grapes, and the bespoke shoemaker treats letters. Leather as precious gifts to the masterful writer. The hunt for the right words is fetishistic and quality is its own reward. They collect strong words, curious words, silly words, funny words, surprising words, lucid words, and more words.

The great writer also dismisses words and phrases that come quickly to mind and sweats out every sentence until it hums, until the words have been weaved into a spell. Takeaway from the book, key takeaway, quote, Such considerations of sound and rhythm should go into everything you write. If all your sentences move at the same plodding gait, which even you recognize as deadly but don’t know how to cure, read them aloud.

I write entirely by ear and read everything aloud before letting it go out into the world. You’ll begin to hear Where the trouble lies. So my note here is two of the simplest ways to immediately improve your writing or one, put it away for at least 24 hours before reviewing it again, and then repeat that as many times as you can bear.

And you might be surprised at just how many changes you make. Over the course of each iteration, you might do that 15 times and still find ways to improve what you wrote. It is almost eerie, really. And then, the second tip is, read your writing aloud each time you do that. So each time you review it, you write it right, and then on the first review, read it aloud.

And then on the second review, read it aloud. Again, it will help tremendously in finding ways to fine tune what you wrote. Okay, the fifth and final key takeaway. Quote, writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly about anything at all. My note here is, If you want to be a better researcher, studier, learner, thinker, you want to incorporate writing into those activities because, contrary to what many people think, writing isn’t just a way to record the results of research, study, learning, or thinking.

It is a medium of all of that work. Most people think of research study learning thinking purely as internal processes, and they think of writing as a way to document finished thoughts. The fabled physicist Richard Feynman would disagree, however. He was once interviewed by a historian who spotted Feynman’s notebooks and said how pleased he was to see that there were wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.

Feynman corrected him. They aren’t a record of my thinking process, he said. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on paper. Now, the historian didn’t get it. He said the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here. No, Feynman said, it’s not a record. Not really. It’s working.

You have to work on paper and this is the paper. So what is the takeaway here? What is the lesson? If you can learn to write clearly and fluently about something, you will learn to think clearly and fluently about it. In fact, it’s basically impossible to develop deep and rich understandings and to reach new and intriguing insights without doing a lot of writing because While our minds are fantastic at spotting similarities, dissimilarities, patterns, they are comparatively awful at accessing and surveying large landscapes of information.

Writing allows us to externalize information, however, which in turn allows our mind to focus on what it’s best at, on analyzing the information that we have externalized, unless, On what it fumbles with, which is remembering things to try to analyze. I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful.

And if you did subscribe to the show, because it makes sure that you don’t miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people. People who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn’t like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, Mike at muscle for life.

com muscle F O R life. com. And let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about. Maybe what you’d like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I’m always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.