My personal kind of beat-up copy I read this book for the first time a few years ago in middle school, when I got it as a birthday present from an adult who had heard I liked to write stories. At that time I was in this phase where I believed that the more adjectives and the bigger words I used, the more authoritative I sounded. So when William Zinsser popped out and started telling me to Simplify, simplify, simply, my first impulse was to slam the book shut. But soon I saw the value of his advice, and that is how On Writing Well changed my life and my perspective on writing. What really convinced me to listen to him was how well he wrote. Zinsser has this awe-inspiringly simple voice when he writes. Reading his book was like sitting in an English class. It was like listening to a soft-spoken but amicable relative talk. True to his own teachings, there was not a single unnec...