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William Zinsser

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Writing To Learn Paperback – June 4, 1993

by William Zinsser (Author)

4.3 581 ratings

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This is an essential book for everyone who wants to write clearly about any subject and use writing as a means of learning.

Review

"An elegant exposition of the thesis that to write is to learn...in the tradition of Strunk and White, a model in its own right."Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

William Zinsser is a writer, editor and teacher. He began his career on the New York Herald Tribune and has since written regularly for leading magazines. During the 1970s he was master of Branford College at Yale. His 17 books, ranging from baseball to music to American travel, include the influential Writing to Learn and Writing About Your Life. He teaches at the New School in New York.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harper Perennial
Publication date

June 4, 1993
Dimensions

5.31 x 0.61 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0062720406
ISBN-13

978-0062720405
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On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

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Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past

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Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly—about any subject at all.
Highlighted by 2,062 Kindle readers
Clear writing is the logical arrangement of thought; a scientist who thinks clearly can write as well as the best writer.
Highlighted by 1,894 Kindle readers
The Art of Thinking, by Vincent Ruggiero, and Reasoning, by Michael Scriven.
Highlighted by 1,452 Kindle readers

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial (June 4, 1993)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062720406
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062720405
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.61 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #55,926 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Communication Reference (Books)
- #25 in Rhetoric (Books)
- #157 in Fiction Writing Reference (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.3 581 ratings

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William Zinsser

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William Zinsser, a writer, editor, and teacher, is a fourth-generation New Yorker, born in 1922. His 18 books, which range in subject from music to baseball to American travel, include several widely read books about writing.

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, first published in 1976, has sold almost 1.5 million copies to three generations of writers, editors, journalists, teachers and students.

Writing to Learn which uses examples of good writing in science, medicine and technology to demonstrate that writing is a powerful component of learning in every subject.

Writing Places, a memoir recalling the enjoyment and gratitude the places where William Zinsser has done his writing and his teaching and the unusual people he encountered on that life journey.

Mr. Zinsser began his career in 1946 at the New York Herald Tribune, where he was a writer, editor, and critic. In 1959 he left to become a freelance writer and has since written regularly for leading magazines. From 1968 to 1972 he was a columnist for Life. During the 1970s he was at Yale, where, besides teaching nonfiction writing and humor writing, he was master of Branford College. In 1979 he returned to New York and was a senior editor at the Book-of-the-Month Club until 1987, when he went back to freelance writing. He teaches at the New School and at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is an adviser on writing to schools, colleges, and other organizations. He holds honorary degrees from Wesleyan University, Rollins College, and the University of Southern Indian and is a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library.

William Zinsser's other books include Mitchell & Ruff, a profile of jazz musicians Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff; American Places, a pilgrimage to 16 iconic American sites; Spring Training, about the spring training camp of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1988; and Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs; and he is the Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. A jazz pianist and songwriter, he wrote a musical revue, What's the Point, which was performed off Broadway in 2003.

Mr. Zinsser lives in his home town with his wife, the educator and historian Caroline Zinsser. They have two children, Amy Zinsser, a business executive, and John Zinsser, a painter and teacher.

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4.3 out of 5

581 global ratings

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Douglass Andrew Morrison

A text for thinkers

Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2023

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Among the useful things I took away from this Zinsser text are the following:
• “Writing is a form of thinking, whatever the subject…”
• “Every discipline has a literature…”
• “Clear writing is the logical arrangement of thought; a scientist who thinks clearly can write as well as the best writer…”
• “Writing and thinking and learning were the same process..”
• “Learning, he seemed to be saying, takes a multitude of forms; expect to find them in places where you least expect them…”
• “Along the way I’ve also discovered that knowledge is not as compartmentalized as I thought it was. Hermes and the periodic table are equally its household gods, and writing is the key that opens the door…”
• “Motivation is crucial to writing – students will write far more willingly if they write about subjects that interest them and that they have an aptitude for…”
• “Writing is learned by imitation…”
• “…the essence of writing is rewriting…”
• “A piece of writing must be viewed as a constantly evolving organism…”
• “Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts…”
• “ Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow…”
• “… writing is linear and sequential…”
• “Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not infrequently found together and it is seldom easy to distinguish between the first two…” I find this observation that Zinsser took from The Birth of the Republic particularly reassuring in light of our contemporary ‘hair-on-fire’ news wherein everything is unprecedented and worse than we have ever known!
• “Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. It’s a physical activity, unlike reading…”
• “…the act of writing will summon from the buried past exactly what we need exactly when we need it. Memory intuition and chance associations will always generate a certain percentage of what any writer writes. The remainder is generated by reason.”
• “…there are two kinds of writing: explanatory writing that transmits existing information or ideas… and exploratory writing that enables us to discover what we want to say…”

Zinsser provides separate chapters with examples of clear, concise, and illuminating writing from a variety of different disciplines. His specific examples were not as important, to me, as the generic notion that good writing can explore and explain every discipline of thinking. I recommend this book to thinkers, whether they choose to become writers, or not.

9 people found this helpful

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Raul Lara

Written a life time ago yet...

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2023

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Relevant to this day, it's simple message and it's multiple examples aligned with the message of this book got me thinking about how to put it on practice.
Writing in all my learning processes is difficult and takes a lot of time, but I truly appreciate the benefits that it will have.
The key is writing is very useful for learning, learning to write is necessary.

One person found this helpful

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Ed Evans

An Importrant Book on Writing to Learn and Learning to Write

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2019

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Mr. Zinsser echoes many of my fears and concerns with writing. At 18 years old, I wrote my first and most meaningful official document, an explanation of an infantryman's death. I sought to explain how my fire-team leader died from a bullet fired from a "spider hole" in the "Iron Triangle," Vietnam, January 11, 1966. A hail of bullets struck my comrade and nearly took off my head several times that morning.

Neither had I any idea of what my leaders expected nor did I have the simple skills to give a good account of that moment. If I had followed some model, something like Ernie Pyle's war correspondence (a stretch), I could have honored my fallen leader. If I had the writing skills, I could have brought clarity of the moment to others. That document testified to my lack of writing experience.
Of course, I see my childhood education would have changed dramatically had my parents and teachers insisted that I "settle down" and "learn to learn" by "writing across the curriculum." Education ought to follow this simple process and remain directed by it. Of course, it would not hurt to avoid wars in the first place.

86 people found this helpful

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Meh

Writing to Learn [Any?] Subject

Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2015

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William Zinsser starts his book by admitting something – he’s never understood chemistry. I read his book under the misguided assumption that it would teach me how to write and think clearly in any subject, including chemistry. I believe that if Zinsser was made to read a chemistry textbook written using his principles, he would not learn chemistry. To be sure, he would learn of chemistry. He would relish in the passion the author had in describing elements and compounds, but he would be unable to use the formulas and apply the rules correctly.

Having read Doug Buehl’s Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines, I imagined that this book would serve as a comparable supplementary guide to writing effectively in academic disciplines. It did not.

For those of you who do not know, Buehl’s book teaches strategies for how to become literate in different academic fields. How you read a physics textbook is not the same as how you read a chemistry textbook, and how you read a chemistry textbook is not the same as how you’d read a novel. Every discipline has a different approach that readers should use to maximize their understanding of the information in the text.
Different academic disciplines have different approaches to make their readers understand their theories. For example, to teach chemistry effectively, a chemistry textbook would take a formula, explain its components and apply it to a reaction commonly found in nature. Then it would model how to perform the formula, and then have the reader attempt to use it. Only by gaining practice with using the formula in different contexts will the reader truly begin to understand it. In his book, Zinsser does not explicitly acknowledge this; however, he does state that by writing problems out, students will gain a deeper understanding of the formulas they are using (in the math chapter), but that is among the only real suggestion he has for students.

Zinsser disagrees with the thought that different styles of writing are required for writing about different subjects. He views all subjects as being under the same umbrella of knowledge. It is likely that his perception was shaped by both gaining a working knowledge of various intellectual and artistic pursuits as a journalist, and by working with Yale intellectuals who could easily find common ground with academics and artists who seemed to hold polar opposite interests. What these experiences did not show him was common knowledge: being able to hold a conversation with an intellectual about their field, and gaining the skills to be an intellectual in the field, are two totally different things.
Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All offers one chapter that I feel really encapsulates the heart of what its title implies – the mathematics chapter. The math chapter is the only chapter which a teacher describes how she integrates writing in her curriculum. It is also the only chapter which provides insight into the student reception of the integration of writing into the curriculum. Readers are only left with an implication that writing to learn has been successfully implemented in other academic disciplines – otherwise, why would they be mentioned in the book?

Zinsser ends his book the same way he started his book, still not knowing chemistry. If he had tried to learn chemistry, or math, or physics, during the course of his book he might have been able to describe pedagogical methods that should be included in writing a book to teach these disciplines. He may have been able to describe the kinds of examples that should be included to ensure that the principles taught generalize to situations outside of the examples given.

What he has written is a general guide to write newspaper articles and memoirs in any subject.

I give the book three stars. William Zinsser is a talented writer to be sure; I feel a little dirty for giving such an enjoyable, witty, aesthetic book a mediocre score. However, the material is clearly lacking in what it purports to convey.

66 people found this helpful

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Jonathan Treviño M

El cápitulo de matemáticas es lindo.

Reviewed in Mexico on March 9, 2022

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Agradable!

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Amazon Customer

Like the style and stories

Reviewed in Germany on August 11, 2022

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Changes your perspective about writing. I would recommend it as a fun read and to help feel less scared of writing

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

It's not a how-to book. It's better, much better

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 23, 2022

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This book isn’t necessarily what the title promises - it’s better. I like Bill Zinsser’s writing and his writing-about-writing, so I was going to enjoy this book, whatever. It’s a treasure trove of examples of good, clear, accessible writing. What does it have to do with learning? Well, it’s not a how-to manual. There are no five-steps, or three-stages, or six-principles. The book is essentially a memoir, an account of Zinsser’s journey into discovering how others have used writing to help them learn, in a wide range of fields and disciplines. It gives examples of these writings, and the theme is that through writing, these writers learned more (much more) about their subjects. The misleading item is the subtitle, “How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All”, since the book doesn’t include any how-to instructions, it teaches by example. (I can imagine a marketing person added the subtitle, it doesn’t even appear on the cover.) If you like Bill Zinsser’s other works on writing, then I think you’ll like this book, too.

7 people found this helpful

sudharsanam

Good Book

Reviewed in India on March 2, 2020

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For the writer in you

Nicholas Lauder

Absolutely love this book

Reviewed in Canada on January 26, 2018

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This book is a wonderful guide to what is excellent writing across all disciplines. Great examples of what makes engaging writing. Already I am starting to notice an improvement in my own writing. Zinsser is full of great advice. Highly recommend for anyone who would like to improve their writing.

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