Irza Fidah's Key Ideas from Writing to Learn
by William Zinsser

Obscurity being one of the deadly sins, anyone might suppose that serious people would labor mightily to avoid it in their writing. But to suppose this is to overlook another force of nature that almost equals entropy as a drag on life’s momentum.

In writing, short is usually better than long. Short words and sentences are easier for the eye and the mind to process than long ones, and an article that makes its case succinctly is the highest form of courtesy to the reader. Somehow it never occurs to sloppy writers that they are being fundamentally rude. Most pieces can be cut by 50 percent without losing any substance. Brevity is one sign of a well-organized mind.

Jargon is the lingo of people in specialized fields who have infected each other with their private terminology and don’t think there’s any other way to say what they mean. Somewhere they forgot about the mother tongue. There’s almost no subject that can’t be made accessible in good English.

Whenever you see in the newspaper or hear someone say that writing in America has gone to the dogs, you can bet that it’s the educated classes who are doing the bewailing and the uneducated classes and the young who are being bewailed.

• Never use the same word twice for the same idea. Thus you make sure that the reader never knows whether it’s the same idea or not.
• Never use the first person where you can use ambiguous phrases like “the writer” (especially when you’ve just mentioned some other writer) or, better still, “it is thought” or “it is considered,” so that the reader can’t be exactly sure who thinks what, or what—if anything—you do think.
• Never use an active verb where a passive verb will do. It pads out the sentence nicely and puts more distance between you and the facts—and the reader.

The question of the “truth” of the individual geometric propositions is thus reduced to one of the “truth” of the axioms.

Zinsser believes that writers often conspire in their own insecurity. (By “writers” he also means every student of high school age and older who writes a paper of any kind.) Teachers of writing are dismally aware of the inclination of writers to equate the worth of their writing with the worth of who they are.

The equation goes: “You think this is a terrible paper, therefore you must think I’m a terrible person.”

The thought is natural, perhaps almost inevitable: when we write we put some part of our self on paper for other people to judge. But finally that thought is a self-indulgence.

Writers who think they are being criticized when only their writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher’s reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.

Think flexibly about the field you’re writing about. Its frontiers may no longer be where they were last time you looked.