The Best LEARNING Book in History - 40 Years AHEAD of its Time

Unlock the Potential of Writing for Learning with William Zinser's Method

How Writing Transforms Learning: Unveiling the Power of William Zinser's Method

This is a beautiful book; it's totally transformed my approach to writing and, to some extent, learning. By the end of this video, I hope to have persuaded you that it can do the same for you too.

I want you to see the book, and I want to show you why I like it so much, why I think it's so effective, how it could transform your learning, and also, I'm going to tell you who William Zinser was because he was a very interesting chap.

This is William Zinser, and for about 70 years, he was a professional writer. He worked at the New York Herald Tribune; he wrote for the New Yorker; and he was editor of Yale magazine. But it was as a teacher that he really found his reach and renown. He taught a really popular and highly regarded non-fiction writing course at Yale University, and one of his books called "On Writing Well" (and you can guess what that was about) has sold over one and a half million copies. I have a copy, and I'm going to share it with you later because now we're going to focus on...

This is a book about why you should write, how you should write, and what will happen if you use writing as a tool to learn. And I think the most important thing to say first is that it's not purely aimed at people who want to learn to write, although it does work for that. It's aimed at people who want to learn anything, even math or physics. Now, I battled my way through a Physics degree, and I would have scoffed at the idea of using writing as a way of learning, say, Maxwell's equations, but I don't anymore. Zinser says we can use writing to find out what we know and what we don't know. Are there holes in your knowledge or in your reasoning? Writing will expose them and, by pure force of thought, help you understand them.

But I have a problem, and I don't know; maybe you do too. I hate writing. It's painful for me to squeeze thoughts out of my head and try to put them on paper or type them on a screen. It's slow, it's frustrating, and it never really reads as well as I would have hoped. But you can take comfort in knowing that Zinser didn't like writing either. "I don't like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written, in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like the solution to a mathematical problem."

The book is divided into two parts. The first part is Zinser telling us why he's writing the book in the first place, how he got the idea, what he hopes to achieve, and how he aims to do that. "Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with acts and ideas. It compels us through the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts, organize them, and present them clearly. It forces us to keep asking, 'Am I saying what I want to say?' Very often, the answer is no." And then, part two is...

a curated collection put together by Zinser of what he considers to be really good writing. And he includes passages and then explains why that writing is so good. And that's done in different disciplines, so it's done for art, music, science, and math. But what does Zinser have to say about Part Two? "All the writers represented in Part 2 wrote clearly because the act of writing and rewriting made them think clearly, organize their ideas, tell them what they knew and what they still needed to know, and push them to new areas of knowledge. It can do the same for you."

Now, I have seen criticisms of the book in other reviews that I've read where people say it's not a how-to guide and it doesn't give concrete examples of what you need to do. But that is really the intention, and in fact, on page 75, Zinser himself says...

"It's also about writing to learn, and it is. I've left that mostly implicit, not wanting to numb you with repetition of the same obvious point." What I find really interesting is that Zinser's intuition was really spot-on. He suggested that two types of writing are useful: explanatory writing, where you explain what you know, and exploratory writing, which is more of a free form of writing where you write anything you like about a topic, including how it relates to you, what you understand, what you don't understand, and how it relates to stuff that you already know about that subject. And it turns out that what Zinser is suggesting encompasses some of the best-known learning techniques that have been discovered using scientific research.

And they are, can I remember, retrieval practice, spaced practice, elaborative interrogation, and interleaving. Now, I promise to show you one of Zin's other books, so

Here it is. Just take a look at this. If you want to learn to write or you want to improve your writing, this book is an excellent choice. It's packed full of wisdom and advice. This is what Zinser has to say about ending a piece of writing: "When you're ready to stop, stop. If you've presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit."

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