Simplicity William Zinsser Analysis

William Zinsser wrote about how people use too many words and use over complicated words to sound smart. This is a common problem with many writings is that people will use extra words or fancy sounding words for a number of reasons. A student may add lots of extra words when trying to make a certain page amount or word count on an essay. Someone trying to sound smart, like a doctor or a professor, will add words people don’t use much in today's society that will give them the perception that they are smart. In William Zinsser’s Simplicity he covers all this and gives examples on how people add too much clutter to their writing. William Zinsser mentions some of the documents that are most commonly infected with clutter. The documents he mentions are American commerce: the memo, corporation reports, business letters, and notices from banks. All these documents are commonly known for being overly complicated to the common person who is not an expert in …show more content…
He accounts this to everything that the reader’s attention is being computer against, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, spouse children, and pets. With all these other things that the reader can do the reader has no reason to try and understand a poorly written article full of clutter and over complicated words no one knows. It’s best to keep things short and simple. William Zinsser does not contribute the reader's 30 second attention span being lazy or being dumb. He says that the writer then self has not done there job properly. The reader, at first, may blame themselves but they will ultimately stop trying to make sense of the piece. Writing a good sentence is not an accident. That means you actually have to try to be a good writer to make a sentence that gets your point across clearly. If a reader gets lost while reading they’re most likely to not going try to understand a poorly written