Writing to Learn by William Zinsser explains the power of writing for learning and promoting clear thinking. He takes us on a tour of the disciplines, showing that writing should not be left to English teachers. It’s clear that creating written explanations of your knowledge will not only help you internalize it, but it will also reveal the holes in your knowledge. This book contains delightful examples of excellent writing from many disciplines. It was a joy to read.

Preface

• Writing is a form of thinking. It’s not necessary to be a writer to write well. Clear writing is the logical arrangement of thoughts. We write to find out what we know and what we want to say. This is a book full of great ideas for writers.

Part I: 1. Hermes and the Periodic Table

• This chapter tells how William used Latin, which transported him back to the classical world, rather than chemistry, to get into Princeton. He found Latin to be anything but dead, as thousands of its roots are alive and well in English. He then tells of his time at Princeton during World War II, where he took the fast track through courses and was only a few credits short when he joined the Army and headed to Europe. A few courses he took in Florence earned him his Princeton degree.
• After the war, he began his career trying to write clearly at The New York Herald Tribune. He also became a logic nut. Writing is a basic skill for getting through life, yet many adults are terrified of the prospect. Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly. That is what this book is about.

2. Writing Across the Curriculum

• The key concept is that teaching writing should not be left only to English teachers. This may be the most difficult pedagogical task. Motivation is crucial to writing, but assigned tasks in most schools don’t offer much. Writing is learned by imitation, but we eventually move on to our own style. William stresses the idea that once you dash off a draft, it will need a lot of editing to polish it into a respectable finished product.
• Teachers of other subjects need to find exemplars of literature in their fields to share with students. Everyone loves a good story and every discipline should have some. Even in technical subjects, the best writers are good at writing for the lay person and every subject can be made interesting.

3. A Liberal Education

• After 13 years at the and 11 more as a freelance writer, William ended up at Yale, where he edited the Yale Alumni Magazine with a circulation of 100,000 Yale undergraduates and graduate alumni. During that time he drew on two sources of energy, confidence and ego. If you don’t have confidence in what you are doing, you might as well not do it.
• There is no subject that can’t be made accessible in good English with careful writing and editing. Write good, clean sentences and organize them into a coherent shape. You need to write, rewrite, and prune to hammer out a clear and simple product. Clear writing is a corollary to clear thinking, and therefore a key to learning. You will learn a lot about a subject writing about it that you can’t learn any other way. There are examples of good writing here.

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