Writing With a Word Processor

by William Zinsser

"Most people are scared of computers. Most people are also scared of the act of writing. I didn't know what would happen when the fear of computers got combined with the fear of writing. But I did know that the word processor was here to stay. And I knew this if I could master it, anybody could." .....William Zinsser

Genres: Writing

117 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

William Knowlton Zinsser is an American writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher. He began his career as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked as a feature writer, drama editor, film critic, and editorial writer. He has been a longtime contributor to leading magazines.

Reviews

[Bright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This excerpt is why I rated this book so high:

"Writing is a personal transaction conducted on paper. It is one person talking to another person. Readers identify first with the person who is writing, not with what the person is writing about. Often, in fact, we will read about a subject that really doesn't interest us because we like the writer. We like the warmth or humor or humanity that he brings to his subject. We may think we are responding to the writer's "style"; actually we are responding to his personality as he expresses it in words."

I started this book because I wanted to read about how to write.
I finished this book because of "how he expresses his personality in words".

[Mark Fallon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part technological artifact, part sound advice for writers, and 100% joy for fans of good writing.

For anyone who lived through the introduction of word processors in the 1980s, there's a lot to reminisce. For anyone born after 1990, it may be hard to comprehend that Zinsser was adopting to "cutting edge technology" when he wrote this book.

[Jeremiah Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If one of your favorite words is "diskette," you are in for a treat. This book walks you through what it is like to own a computer in 1983. And most importantly, it's not a manual but a story. I love it. I wonder if Zinsser ever lived to see a smart phone.

My favorite parts are the interactions with customer service.

[Howard Fielding · Rating 5 out of 5]

My recent experience re-learning how to use a manual typewriter prompted me to revisit a book I bought nearly 40 years ago: William Zinsser’s “Writing With a Word Processor” (1983). It’s out of print now. I bought the Kindle edition rather than fish my original copy out of my writing library and risk an avalanche.

Zinsser was a seasoned journalist who started his career pounding typewriters for the New York Herald Tribune. He moved on to freelancing for major publications and serving as executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

During the 1970s, he taught non-fiction writing at Yale University. I was a contemporary of his students (albeit at a smaller rival). His “On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction” was an indispensable guide to writers of my generation–and subsequent ones. Now in its third edition, it is still a top seller in instructional books for writers.

Alas, this was not in the stars for “Writing With a Word Processor.” Critics on Amazon — even the five-star ones — note that although the reviewers loved Zinsser, the book is “obsolete.” One even suggested that an update would be great.

Two reasons why that won’t happen:
1) The man is dead. William Zinsser died in 2015 at the age of 92.
2) This isn’t a how-to book. Zinsser made that point repeatedly in the text. It is the first-person story of one author’s transition from the typewriter to the early digital age. It should be read as autobiography, memoir, and history.

In it, Zinsser takes the reader from the moment he realized that word processing was the wave of the future to the day, 10 months later, when he delivered his manuscript to the publisher: “Tomorrow, when I deliver my book to Harper & Row, dodging the ghosts of Herman Melville and Thomas Wolfe and dozens of other writers who walked through the streets of Manhattan looking like writers, nobody will mistake me for a member of the clan. I’ll have no fat manuscript–just two small disks."

Along the way, Zinsser the writing coach narrates his own story and concerns. What happens when the computer crashes and his work is lost into the “electricity?” (Today’s more succinct word would be the “ether.”) What will this mean for his practice of rewriting each paragraph to perfection before going on to the next? Will he lose his writer’s voice and become more mechanical?

Today, of course, computers still crash. Rewriting is simple and the biggest risk is that we won’t back up earlier drafts. Our voices are still our own (although spelling and grammar checkers are beginning to fill in the words for us.)

Some things, he says, will never change: "The main thing — whether you’re writing one page or five hundred — is to try to write clearly and warmly and well.

"Writing is a personal transaction conducted on paper. It is one person talking to another person. Readers identify first with the person who is writing, not with what the person is writing about. Often, in fact, we will read about a subject that really doesn’t interest us because we like the writer. We like the warmth or humor or humanity that he brings to his subject. We may think we are responding to the writer’s 'style'; actually we are responding to his personality as he expresses it in words."

With cloud computing, direct-to-print publishing, and terrabytes of storage, we no longer have to worry about squeezing a “manuscript” onto floppies that each store only 125 pages. Zinsser even anticipates this: “What this will mean for a writer or editor with a word processor is a future that will save time and labor in countless ways that I’ve only begun to glimpse. Right now it’s enough that I could write and set a book and get it published in less than a year.”

This book does not need an update. You are living it. But you can’t see where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re coming from.

I give this book five stars for its writer’s voice, his advice, and his ability to capture an important turning point in our modern culture.

[Derek Truscott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course this book is charmingly out of date (Zinsser incorporated it into subsequent editions of his masterpiece, On Writing Well). But it is such a lovely example of his beautiful writing and well worth reading on that grounds alone. You can read for yourself how he achieves the "three cardinal goals of good writing--clarity, simplicity and humanity."

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd give it a higher rating. Well written. But it's really out of date now in many ways. Read his "On Writing Well" instead.

[Eddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very entertaining book

Perhaps this book was a precursor to the for Dummies series in the way it primed the reader to do writing on computers of early days. Today this book is of little practical value thanks to the popularity and ubiquity of computing devices. They are so easy to use even if advanced that almost anyone can start writing on them without the anxious moments experienced by the author. The cumbersome commands of his wordprocessor have long been surpassed by accessible icons and shortcuts. And nobody worries so much anymore about losing their work because of a faulty "diskette". In fact, the diskette is not even known to an entire generation of people. In short, this book has been "obsoleted".

I quite enjoyed reading it for entertainment and for the insight into the mind of the very first users of early computers---and word processors.

Not bad at all for an accidental purchase.

[C.]

Interesting read for its historic value. ;)
(After all, it was published in 1983. Anyone seriously considering a word processor for their writing ought to consult a child or grandchild instead of a book.)