He worked as a feature writer and film critic for the late, lamented New York Herald Tribune wrote 18 books on myriad subjects taught nonfiction writing at Yale worked as a senior editor at the Book-of-the-Month Club moonlighted as a jazz pianist and, while in his late 80s, wrote a blog on the arts for the Web site of The American Scholar that won a National Magazine Award for digital commentary. “We’ll figure out what it is after you’ve written it.” She pushes back, protesting that her intention has not been to write a memoir. Dykstra write a personal narrative that couples her grandfather’s exotic travels with her own. Zinsser, whose smiling grimace, as one former student has put it, can suggest fondness for a person whose writing is causing him pain. Not long ago North Dakota Quarterly published an essay by Ms. Now she is trying to write a book about a colorful grandfather of hers who traveled the Upper Midwest early in the last century, collecting songs of the vanishing lumber camps. Back in the 1990s she helped revitalize Times Square as president of its business improvement district and, along the way, took a writing course taught by Mr. Sitting at his table is Gretchen Dykstra, a woman of vast experience as a teacher and public servant. “People read with their ears, whether they know it or not,” Mr. Sitting with elbows propped and hands clenched, and with the sunglasses and cap protecting eyes damaged by glaucoma, he listens as students read their drafts and fret over narrative. The only difference is that he can no longer see. And he is still teaching at 90, holding one-on-one counseling sessions for accomplished and aspiring writers at a round wooden table close to those bookshelves. Zinsser taught for several years at Yale University. The book, first published in 1976, grew out of a writing course that Mr. “We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.” “Clutter is the disease of American writing,” he declared in one passage that tends to haunt anyone daring to write about Mr. Sometimes all you have to say is: Hand me the Zinsser. In newsrooms, publishing houses and wherever the labor centers on honing sentences and paragraphs, you are almost certain to find among the reference works a classic guide to nonfiction writing called “On Writing Well,” by Mr.

The many hundreds of books in his Upper East Side apartment stand at attention, as if awaiting instruction from this slight man in a baseball cap and sunglasses who, for a half-century, has coached others on how to write. The written word looms over William Zinsser.

On Writing Well by William Zinsser