What word processors revealed…

An excerpt from the introduction of William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well:

“Two opposite things happened. The word processor made good writers better and bad writers worse. Good writers know that very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time or the fifth time. For them the word processor was a rare gift, enabling them to fuss endlessly with their sentences–cutting and revising and reshaping–without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen. How could such beautiful sentences not be perfect?”

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