<story><title>Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”</title><url>https://www.robinwieruch.de/lessons-learned-on-writing-well/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>x1798DE</author><text>I was so disappointed with this book. Some of the platitudes Zinsser goes into are reasonable, like try to be uncluttered, direct and to the point, but all the worked examples seem to just be arbitrarily chosen to his taste. For example, in the chapter on &amp;quot;clutter&amp;quot;, Zinsser picks out this passage from &lt;i&gt;Walden&lt;/i&gt; as his exemplar of &amp;quot;uncluttered English&amp;quot;:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;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.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Dense, incredibly difficult to parse, with a non-standard use of &amp;quot;front&amp;quot; as a verb and what seems to be a triple-negative. If I said that sentence to you, out loud, I doubt you would catch the meaning of it on the first pass. The book is filled with stuff like that.&lt;p&gt;That said, I really do want to get better at non-fiction writing, specifically technical writing, but I haven&amp;#x27;t found any good recommendations for &amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot; books on technical writing. If anyone can suggest a decent, pragmatic (as opposed to Strunk-and-White style prescriptivism) introduction to technical writing specifically, I&amp;#x27;d appreciate it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lacampbell</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;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.&amp;quot;
Dense, incredibly difficult to parse, with a non-standard use of &amp;quot;front&amp;quot; as a verb and what seems to be a triple-negative. If I said that sentence to you, out loud, I doubt you would catch the meaning of it on the first pass. The book is filled with stuff like that.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think that&amp;#x27;s difficult for educated native English speakers. Walden was written in 1854, and most people who went to high school in an English speaking country would have some exposure to Shakespeare which is 250 years older than that - so I really don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s very archaic. Are you a non-native speaker? You write English completely fluently but if you&amp;#x27;ve had no real exposure to the literature I can understand why you might find it hard going.&lt;p&gt;I haven&amp;#x27;t taken English since high school, and had no &amp;quot;liberal education&amp;quot; at university, and I did just fine with the audiobook (ie the whole thing was read aloud to me). I am not going to pretend it&amp;#x27;s easy to understand as modern, informal speech but it certainly wasn&amp;#x27;t arduous.</text></comment>
<story><title>Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”</title><url>https://www.robinwieruch.de/lessons-learned-on-writing-well/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>x1798DE</author><text>I was so disappointed with this book. Some of the platitudes Zinsser goes into are reasonable, like try to be uncluttered, direct and to the point, but all the worked examples seem to just be arbitrarily chosen to his taste. For example, in the chapter on &amp;quot;clutter&amp;quot;, Zinsser picks out this passage from &lt;i&gt;Walden&lt;/i&gt; as his exemplar of &amp;quot;uncluttered English&amp;quot;:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;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.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Dense, incredibly difficult to parse, with a non-standard use of &amp;quot;front&amp;quot; as a verb and what seems to be a triple-negative. If I said that sentence to you, out loud, I doubt you would catch the meaning of it on the first pass. The book is filled with stuff like that.&lt;p&gt;That said, I really do want to get better at non-fiction writing, specifically technical writing, but I haven&amp;#x27;t found any good recommendations for &amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot; books on technical writing. If anyone can suggest a decent, pragmatic (as opposed to Strunk-and-White style prescriptivism) introduction to technical writing specifically, I&amp;#x27;d appreciate it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>karlb</author><text>I agree. I struggled through Zinsser and didn&amp;#x27;t highlight much.&lt;p&gt;My colleagues and I have read over 50 books about writing and our 11 favorites are here: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.conversion-rate-experts.com&amp;#x2F;writing&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.conversion-rate-experts.com&amp;#x2F;writing&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In answer to your question, “Handbook of Technical Writing” by Alred et al is good, but I&amp;#x27;d start with the first half of “Keys to Great Writing” by Stephen Wilbers, which deserves its Amazon rating of 4.8&amp;#x2F;5.0.</text></comment>