On Writing Well Audio Collection
Written by William Zinsser
Narrated by William Zinsser
Description
The classic works on the art of nonfiction writing are now in a complete package for your listening pleasure.
This expanded collection presents William Zinsser's On Writing Well, the classic teaching book that has sold more than 1 million copies, together with a new 90-minute section that tells you how to write a memoir.
Based on a course that Zinsser taught at Yale, On Writing Well has long been praised by writers, teachers and students for its sound advice, its clarity and the warmth of its style. It's for everybody who wants to learn how to write or who needs to do some writing to get through the day. Whether you want to write about people and places, science and technology, business, sports or the arts, this is the definitive guide to the craft of nonfiction.
Part II of this collection—on memoir, personal history and family history—tells you in helpful detail how to write the story of your life: who you are, who you once were, and what heritage you come from. Throughout, Zinsser refers to the work of many successful memoir writers, including Frank McCourt, Annie Dillard, Russell Baker and Eudora Welty, to demonstrate how they solved the problems of selection, compression, focus and tone that every memoir writer struggles with.
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.
Reviews
What people think about On Writing Well Audio Collection
4.5Reader reviews
- (5/5)On Writing Well is a simple guide for writing well. Thankfully, as a book about writing should be, it is written well. I found the advice to be accessible and ready to be applied.If you write (and you do) you should read this book.
- (5/5)My job requires me to be able to write well, and this book really helped me to hone my writing skills. Zinsser's advice and techniques are concrete and specific, and after applying his suggestions and theories to my own work, I improved my style tremendously.
- (5/5)Zinsser has produced an inspiring and practical manual in On Writing Well. My AP English teacher in high school recommended this book to me as a reference when I went to her asking how best to improve my own writing——obviously, I aspired to publish. I particularly enjoy Zinsser's thoughts on modern memoirs.
- (5/5)Excellent book on writing and thinking about writing. Zinsser covers a wide breadth of topics, from writing memoirs, to writing about travel, to writing about sports, and more. He makes it very simple - write about people doing things, and write more like you speak than less. Good chapter on organizing a longer work as well.
- (5/5)The best book on writing I've ever read. This book lightly touches on grammar, only to get it out of the way, and then is on to the act of writing. He focuses on the thought process of writing, what to write about, how to write about different subjects, and most importantly how to rewrite what you've just written. Everybody that writes, anything, should read the first section, titled "Principles". Those first fifty pages apply to all forms of writing and will serve you well. William Zinsser wrote in such an engaging style that I'll be adding at least two more of his books to my reading list. And because he talked about it so fondly I might even reread Walden, but that's a long shot.
- (5/5)I stumbled upon this book as I was looking for a guide to writing essays. It looked interesting and the first few pages read well, so I bought it. Little did I know that this book would change my world view on writing and learning. In the first few chapters Mr. Zinsser sounds like an old fashioned English teacher, harping on the fundamentals and simplicity. The fact that he is right made the message easier to absorb. In the latter chapters he focuses on different kinds of writing, that is when he hooked me. Even if you never write a memoir, it is fascinating for me to read about how people go about writing one. Now I am writing my own, for my own consumption, because the process sounds like something that is enlightening and worth doing. The same is true for his chapers on art critique, sports, humor, etc.I have also gained a massive reading list from Mr. Zinsser, now I am curious to a whole new world that I was not aware of and more importantly, I did not care about. But he made me interested in these books because he made me curious about how these authors are able to communicate their message so clearly.