On Writing Well by William Zinsser

On Writing Well

by

William Zinsser

As a teenager I wrote a lot of bad poetry.   And the last several years I have played around with my blog.  First on Yahoo360 and then on Multiply.  When those sites closed I moved to Blogger.   And while I do not get many comments I am always surprised at the number of  page views to my posts.  This past March when my three months in the recliner started with both bones broken in my lower leg, I got aspirations that maybe I would like to be prepared to enter some of the writing contests that I was seeing announced at that time by the time the 2017 contests were announced.  I began to gather information on a couple of my family  lines that seemed like interesting ones to write about and at the end of August for my birthday gift to myself I purchased and participated in a six week creative family history writing workshop that can be found at this SITE.  One of the many resources provided at The Family History Writing Studio is a book list of recommended reading.  One of the books that was recommended that I could check out from the State Of Ohio library on my kindle was the classic book On Writing Well by William Zinsser.   I finished reading the book in the night last night and found a lot of useful information in it.  I did find myself skimming through parts of it that did not apply to my interests and concentrating on the parts of the book that applied to my aspirations.  I do not have any desire to be a full time writer.  I don't even care if I win the contests I enter.  I just do not want to send in an entry that I am not happy with.   The course I took this September and October convinced me that "creative non fiction" is not my genre although I do think elements of it are things I will use a lot and the organizational skills I learned for putting together my writing are going to be invaluable.  In addition there were check lists provided that will facilitate exactly the items I want to research to find the information I want to include in my pieces.   William Zinsser's book also provided information that I will use on how to proceed and some pitfalls to avoid.  I do not know whether this is a book that people who normally read my blog for reading ideas will be interested in, but it is a book I would recommend if a person is trying to polish their writing craft and has not yet read it.  Please click on the links above and enjoy the video below presented by the author.