“But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what–these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.” (Zinsser, 6-7)
I couldn’t agree more with this statement. It’s one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard, because as Zinsser mentioned, most people love to assume that there is something wrong with a simple sentence. They insist on making it complicated or wordy, and this only confuses the reader or listener. I admit that I used to overuse the thesaurus when writing essays in the past because I had a similar mindset. For some reason, I believed that simple sentences made me sound too dull. I’d right click on random words for synonyms and replace them with terms that I never even heard of. But as long as they sounded fancy enough, I went along with it. It took me a little while to realize that what I was doing actually made my writing sound worse, but I eventually stopped overusing that thesaurus tool and trusted myself to come up with the right words. This doesn’t mean that I never use it at all, but I definitely keep it to a minimum. I now understand that simplicity is always the way to go. Getting the right message across is more important than trying to sound intelligent. It’s the key to writing well, and it’s likely to draw more readers.
