On Reading Well

Though William Zinsser's book On Writing Well has made me an only somewhat better writer, it's made me a much better reader. That's because Zinsser encouraged me to stop blaming myself whenever I quit reading something midway through. As Zinsser says, if a reader stops before the end, it's the writer's fault.

(If any of you reading this blog post quit before the end, blame me.)

Readers, Zinsser says, put up with a lot of bad writing before giving up. And when they do give up, they often blame themselves. Maybe they didn't give the piece enough attention? Or maybe they're not smart enough to follow along? No. It's the writer's job to ensure readers don't need a surplus of attention or smarts to understand what the writer means to say. Writers must be clear and concise.

When I'm reading, there are two patterns that make it likely I won't stay till the end. The first is redundancy, which causes me to skip words and sentences because there exist more than are needed. As a writer, redundancy is easy to fix—so long as one has a computer with a working delete or backspace key.

The second pattern is too much rereading—too much scanning backwards and reading again parts of a sentence to make sense of what the writer is saying. When readers do a lot of rereading, their eyeballs continually flicker back-and-forth as they take in sentences in lots of small, out-of-order chunks. This is as opposed to the eyes more evenly sweeping left-to-right and taking in sentences in fewer passes.

Some rereading is unavoidable, as our eyes will always dart around at least a little when we read. But bad writing requires a lot more darting around than good writing. And darting around is exhausting. Eventually, it causes readers to give up. Only, thanks to Zinsser, we can stop blaming ourselves for moving on to better written pieces.