Justin Yap English 96 Janet Goldberg 09/12/08 Writing: The Most Difficult Thing a Person Can Do In today’s American writing, more people are adding unnecessary words, also known as “clutter.” In “Simplicity” from On Writing Well by William Zinnser writes how to be specific when writing so that the reader will comprehend without having any trouble. Zinsser provides three examples of clutter to show how important people can also have errors in their writing. One example is from the president of his university writing a letter to the alumni. Zinnser shows this example to prove that even the president of his university has wordy sentences. In his other two examples, he shows how a run on sentence and a sentence that has unnecessary information looks like. He then talks about several reasons why writers have such errors. Writers must consider their readers because readers only have “an attention span of about 30 seconds” (Zinsser 9). A person is distracted from reading through various things: radio, spouse, home, TV, etc. Most of all, the biggest distraction to a person is sleep. When a writer switches tenses or pronouns in the middle of their thought it confuses the reader and will most likely discourage the reader to continue on reading; such acts should be avoid. Some readers have to read over the writing to comprehend what the writer is trying to imply in the message and the reason why that is the writer made it difficult for the reader to understand.
Zinnser ends his essay by having the writer have a clear mind for it will then make the writing more clear and precise. Most writers question themselves if what they wrote was the message they were trying to convey. He leaves us with the thought that a clear sentence requires constant revising since writing is one of the most difficult things to do.