Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All by William Zinsser

Author:William Zinsser [Zinsser, William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-04-29T14:00:00+00:00

I was also reminded that science in the hands of a good writer will have an unexpected human dimension. In this case the link is the tag that gets fastened to the turtle, requesting the finder to send it back to the University of Florida and to say where and when it was caught. Who are those finders? Professor Carr gives us a sampling of their replies. Most of them are fishermen and other coastal dwellers in remote villages and islands—people not in the habit of writing to professors of zoology. Yet they somehow understand the importance of what the man in Florida is trying to find out and are eager not to botch their brief role. The graciousness of their letters is one of the ornaments of the book:

After saluting you affectionately I permit myself to communicate to you having captured a turtle with a metallic plaque which…

I am a Miskito Indian from a small village named Dakura along the Miskito coast, to be able to remit this to you I was forced to come 15 miles to Puerto Cabezas, the closest point of communication…

I am very glad to be the one that found this tyrtle drifting down to the Nicaraguan’s water it was found in the Pear Lagoon bar on thursday 18 of August at 6:00 o’clock in the morning. I wish that I have explained every thing the right way…

I am pleased to tell you that this turtle was catch at Marroon Cay by setting nets. I caught it on the 17 of Octobre of the passed year at 9:00 a.m. Nothing else for the moment, except I would like to keep in touch…

Atentively I direct myself to you to send you a plaque that I found encrusted on a turtle that I caught on the coast of Cojoro Venezuela. This demands that it be sent to your Institute. Receive a cordial embrace…

Unlike Archie Carr, who dropped into this book out of the blue, Charles Darwin is someone I knew I wanted to have along on the ride. The odds that he wouldn’t be a good writer struck me as small—someone who gives the frontiers of knowledge an immense push is a good bet to be someone who can express his ideas clearly. Writing is the handmaiden of leadership; Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence. I can’t claim, however, that my theory is watertight; it gets shipwrecked, for instance, on the rocky prose of Buckminster Fuller, and Fuller is by no means the only innovative thinker whose thoughts spill out in majestic disarray.

Fortunately, Darwin didn’t let me down. Two pages were enough to prove my hunch. I bought a copy of his The Voyage of the Beagle and started right in:

After having been twice driven back by heavy south-western gales, Her Majesty’s ship Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command of Captain Fitz Roy, R. N., sailed from Devonport on the 27th of December, 1831. The object

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