One of the most confusing and unexpectedly reassuring ideas in William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” is from Chapter 5, where he discusses audience. Zinsser presents his audience with two different views. One view has writers being careful of losing the attention of their readers, while in the second view, he has writers writing for themselves and not for an imaginary audience. However, these two views seem contradictory when they are first assessed. After all, if readers get bored and lose interest quickly, wouldn’t writers need to constantly adjust their writing to accommodate their readers?

That being said, the more I reflected on this, I realized that Zinsser is issuing an important warning about falling into a trap. Writing will fail if a writer is trying too hard to please their audience, and trying to anticipate every reader’s reaction leads to stiff writing, a lack of clarity, and an impersonal voice. When Zinsser encourages writers to write for themselves, he doesn’t mean to ignore readers but also to just allow the writer’s authentic self-confidence to come through in their writing. A reader is much more likely to be engaged with a writing if the writer has confidence, connection, and personal investment in it.

Also, in Jakob Nielsen’s article “How Users Read on the Web,” he supports this same idea when he describes user behavior when readers read online content. Online readers do not read through content word for word, but they typically tend to skim the content to identify a specific structure to determine the overall message. Therefore, he furthers the idea that it is extremely importance to make sure that your content is clearly and concisely written. Both badly worded and overly worded content will lose readers faster than clear and concise written content. Writing for everyone will ultimately almost always result in reaching no one.

Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” also adds another point to this conversation. According to Carr, digital media alters how our brains respond to distractions and small engagement, or in a distracted world, the solution is not to overcompensate, but to write intentionally. Therefore, if a writer communicates their strong idea clearly, it becomes something the reader can focus on despite all distractions they might have going on in the background.

Also, Steven Pinker explains how bad writing happens in his essay, “The Source of Bad Writing.” He claims that bad writing usually comes from writers being insecure, because rather than writing clearly, the writer is trying to sound impressive, academic, or what they think is correct. When the writer loses focus on what they want to actually say, the readers won’t stay engaged. Writing for yourself, as Zinsser suggests, helps the writer create something based on a genuine interest of the subject.

In conclusion, Zinsser’s advice is more about the writer and reader than how to write. When you write for yourself, you’re giving respect to the reader. When a writer has clarity on their idea, have conviction in their idea, and communicate that idea clearly, then the reader will follow. This holds true even if the reader is constantly distracted by technology.

Citations:

Carr, Nicholas. “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 302, no. 1, 2008. Accessed 25 Jan. 2026.

Nielsen, Jakob. “How Users Read on the Web.” Nielsen Norman Group, 30 Sept. 1997, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/.

Pinker, Steven. The Source of Bad Writing the “Curse of Knowledge” Leads Writers to Assume Their Readers Know Everything They Know. 25 Sept. 2014.

Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. New York, Harperperennial, 2016.