Writing to Learn: How to Write – and Think – Clearly About Any Subject at All by William Zinsser (PDF)

Description

This is an essential book for everyone who wants to write clearly about any subject and use writing as a means of learning.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐While alive, Zinsser was our era’s guru on writing. Besides bestselling On Writing Well, he left us with a cadre of lesser-known works on how to communicate effectively. This work chronicles how to write educational pieces and is replete with examples from a variety of fields, ranging from music to geology and from physics to art.Zinsser’s authority is relatively unquestioned in the popular sphere. I do question whether his writing principles are indeed universal, especially when it comes to worlds like poetry and religion in which ambiguity is sometimes part and parcel of the game. Nonetheless, for mainstream communication, it doesn’t get any better than Zinsser.This work functions as a cross between a general communications guide and an anthology of examples of general communications. Kudos are granted for exploring difficult academic subjects (like science, music, and art) that many claim to be exempt from rules of good writing. In the examples, he illustrates how effective writing can advance the technical nature of a field and still empathetically engage a reader.This work has its limitations. It is less of a how-to an more of an inspirational guide. There are ample resources available on how to write for specialized audiences (like science). This work is not one of them. Rather, it is the diligent and careful work of a generalist teaching others how to write for general audiences. He admits his personal shortcomings, especially when it comes to science, but demonstrates how joy can be found in reading about these subjects – even for those who didn’t “get it” in school. As such, this work is a fun read for generalists like myself who like dabbling in good works from other fields.

⭐Mr. Zinsser echoes many of my fears and concerns with writing. At 18 years old, I wrote my first and most meaningful official document, an explanation of an infantryman’s death. I sought to explain how my fire-team leader died from a bullet fired from a “spider hole” in the “Iron Triangle,” Vietnam, January 11, 1966. A hail of bullets struck my comrade and nearly took off my head several times that morning.Neither had I any idea of what my leaders expected nor did I have the simple skills to give a good account of that moment. If I had followed some model, something like Ernie Pyle’s war correspondence (a stretch), I could have honored my fallen leader. If I had the writing skills, I could have brought clarity of the moment to others. That document testified to my lack of writing experience.Of course, I see my childhood education would have changed dramatically had my parents and teachers insisted that I “settle down” and “learn to learn” by “writing across the curriculum.” Education ought to follow this simple process and remain directed by it. Of course, it would not hurt to avoid wars in the first place.

⭐This book teaches with the example, along the chapters based on different non humanities disciplines the author show with great writers book’s samples how a good text looks like. He states clearly many times that a tidy mind writes tidily and vice versa, if you write your ideas and then work over the text you can also help your mind to think clearly.I don’t give 5 stars because I expected a to learn a technique, because the book’s title “how to”.Anyway it’s a great and fun book, I learned about general culture reading great samples in topics like the general relativity theory, naturalism, chemistry, music, etcetera.

⭐William Zinsser starts his book by admitting something – he’s never understood chemistry. I read his book under the misguided assumption that it would teach me how to write and think clearly in any subject, including chemistry. I believe that if Zinsser was made to read a chemistry textbook written using his principles, he would not learn chemistry. To be sure, he would learn of chemistry. He would relish in the passion the author had in describing elements and compounds, but he would be unable to use the formulas and apply the rules correctly.Having read Doug Buehl’s Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines, I imagined that this book would serve as a comparable supplementary guide to writing effectively in academic disciplines. It did not.For those of you who do not know, Buehl’s book teaches strategies for how to become literate in different academic fields. How you read a physics textbook is not the same as how you read a chemistry textbook, and how you read a chemistry textbook is not the same as how you’d read a novel. Every discipline has a different approach that readers should use to maximize their understanding of the information in the text.Different academic disciplines have different approaches to make their readers understand their theories. For example, to teach chemistry effectively, a chemistry textbook would take a formula, explain its components and apply it to a reaction commonly found in nature. Then it would model how to perform the formula, and then have the reader attempt to use it. Only by gaining practice with using the formula in different contexts will the reader truly begin to understand it. In his book, Zinsser does not explicitly acknowledge this; however, he does state that by writing problems out, students will gain a deeper understanding of the formulas they are using (in the math chapter), but that is among the only real suggestion he has for students.Zinsser disagrees with the thought that different styles of writing are required for writing about different subjects. He views all subjects as being under the same umbrella of knowledge. It is likely that his perception was shaped by both gaining a working knowledge of various intellectual and artistic pursuits as a journalist, and by working with Yale intellectuals who could easily find common ground with academics and artists who seemed to hold polar opposite interests. What these experiences did not show him was common knowledge: being able to hold a conversation with an intellectual about their field, and gaining the skills to be an intellectual in the field, are two totally different things.Writing to Learn: How to Write – and Think – Clearly About Any Subject at All offers one chapter that I feel really encapsulates the heart of what its title implies – the mathematics chapter. The math chapter is the only chapter which a teacher describes how she integrates writing in her curriculum. It is also the only chapter which provides insight into the student reception of the integration of writing into the curriculum. Readers are only left with an implication that writing to learn has been successfully implemented in other academic disciplines – otherwise, why would they be mentioned in the book?Zinsser ends his book the same way he started his book, still not knowing chemistry. If he had tried to learn chemistry, or math, or physics, during the course of his book he might have been able to describe pedagogical methods that should be included in writing a book to teach these disciplines. He may have been able to describe the kinds of examples that should be included to ensure that the principles taught generalize to situations outside of the examples given.What he has written is a general guide to write newspaper articles and memoirs in any subject.I give the book three stars. William Zinsser is a talented writer to be sure; I feel a little dirty for giving such an enjoyable, witty, aesthetic book a mediocre score. However, the material is clearly lacking in what it purports to convey.

⭐It is a very important book to read. With a interesting and useful approach

⭐An amazing journey, one I needed to take in high school or my first year of collage. As an architect I have never been compelled to write to explain my work. I realize now I had no idea how to even begin. At the age of 63 I’m anxious to get started!Mr. Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” and Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” are must have companions to this book. I keep them all handy.

⭐The main premise of this book is that writing can be a tool to understand almost any subject area. The author illustrates that point by showing that well-crafted writing from disciplines spanning the highly technical and the highly visual can be accessible and interesting. For instance, a passage from a book by E.0. Wilson shows that even a discussion of the finer detail of evolution theory can be as engrossing as a detective novel when written well. Further, the author recounts the use of writing in education, for instance, to make mathematics more appealing to students who tend to like the arts more. In general, I liked the book but wish that the author had done more to condense the writing to some general principles. It feels a bit like a collection of essays on various topics. The reader is left to their own devices to figure out the aspects of the writing that made it effective. I also thought that many of the excerpts were too long, especially when the main point of the writing was not clear. In sum, I think that this would have been better as a long-form article with much more condensed reference material.

⭐This book isn’t necessarily what the title promises – it’s better. I like Bill Zinsser’s writing and his writing-about-writing, so I was going to enjoy this book, whatever. It’s a treasure trove of examples of good, clear, accessible writing. What does it have to do with learning? Well, it’s not a how-to manual. There are no five-steps, or three-stages, or six-principles. The book is essentially a memoir, an account of Zinsser’s journey into discovering how others have used writing to help them learn, in a wide range of fields and disciplines. It gives examples of these writings, and the theme is that through writing, these writers learned more (much more) about their subjects. The misleading item is the subtitle, “How to Write – and Think – Clearly About Any Subject at All”, since the book doesn’t include any how-to instructions, it teaches by example. (I can imagine a marketing person added the subtitle, it doesn’t even appear on the cover.) If you like Bill Zinsser’s other works on writing, then I think you’ll like this book, too.

⭐Very cleverly written and a joy to read. William knows his craft. And I now have some great ideas on how I will write my books on maths

⭐excellent book and excellent condition

⭐O autor defende o argumento de que escrever é útil para se aprender um dado assunto. Segundo ele, o ato de escrever sobre um assunto faz com que as falhas no nosso entendimento daquele assunto fiquem evidentes, mostrando os pontos fracos no nosso conhecimento daquele assunto. Além disso, quando escrevemos estamos organizando nosso conhecimento sobre um assunto e criando uma representação mental sobre ele. O livro discute esses e outros pontos de forma bem mais ampla e completa.

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