Reading and Writing in a Digital Age

One of the most difficult things for me to do, upon completing a given writing assignment, is to rewrite what I’ve just written and try to make it even better. After sitting still for a long period of time, I tend to try to convince myself that it’s useless to improve upon perfection and that what I have already written will simply have to do. But William Zinsser’s assertion that “Rewriting is the essence of writing. (pg. 4)” is something that I’ve found to be very true. No matter how many times I’ve changed things that I’ve written, I am nearly always able to find yet another way to phrase things so that they’re either more clear or more accurate. Your writing has to be tirelessly reworked over and over and over again until you can’t figure out what else to do with it (or until you’re so sick of reading the same thing that you turn it in as is).

I like Zinsser’s advice to “beware of the long word that’s no better than the short word”(Zinsser, 15). Long words that most people cant pronounce really are “weeds that will smother what you write.” One time, I sent my very smart older brother an essay to edit for me. He sent it back with red lines crossing out at least half of what I wrote and blue lines through all the words that I hadn’t used correctly. At the bottom, he typed, “you need to start saying things with your words.”

When I read literature that is clean and neat, it is a pleasure to read. And when I read Shakespeare, I wish he read Zinsser’s advice.

I enjoyed how Zinsser advises to “look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly” (p. 16) because there have been many times lately when I find myself frustrated because of an author’s choice of wordy language. Even in college textbooks, authors use complicated vocabulary and complex phrases to sound “educated and formal” when in reality, it only results in confused readers. When I read this part of Zinsser’s book, I was reminded of Albert Einstein when he said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. All of writing has a purpose, so maintaining clarity helps writers to better assert their purpose. I hope that I can try and follow Zinsser’s advice and I found that his trick of “[putting] brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work” (p. 15) really helps because it allows for a more gentle editing approach. Usually, I write very few drafts so I hope that I can begin to edit and “prune” my work much more now.