On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser
Published 2006 · 340 pages · 90,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Essays & Criticism, Writing & Publishing
How hard is On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction to read?
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction scores 21 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Zinsser writes in the plain, exact vocabulary of a working journalist and editor, favoring concrete nouns and verbs over jargon — closer to On Writing's contemporary clarity than to any literary vocabulary test. The handful of specialized terms he does use (lead, unity, clutter) are craft terms he defines himself rather than assumed prior vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 24 out of 100
- The book is itself a demonstration of its own advice: short, declarative sentences with little subordination, closer to 1984's directness than to anything Jamesian. Zinsser occasionally builds a longer sentence for rhythm, but he almost always breaks it before it accumulates more than one dependent clause.
- Abstraction: 34 out of 100
- Every principle arrives with a concrete before-and-after example — a bloated sentence stripped down, a bad lead rewritten — rather than as free-standing theory, putting it closer to Atomic Habits' concreteness than to any purely conceptual craft treatise. The underlying claims about voice, honesty, and attention are abstract, but Zinsser almost never states them without immediately grounding them in an edited sentence.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Part III alone walks through the distinct craft demands of interviewing, travel writing, memoir, science writing, business writing, sports writing, arts criticism and humor, so new material accumulates chapter to chapter even though any single page reads easily. It sits above The Great Gatsby's compression but well below anything encyclopedic like War and Peace.
How On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction is regarded
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction holds a literary regard score of 64 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.