WASHINGTON ¨C When asked to explain the brisk pace of his novels, Elmore Leonard said, ¡°I leave out the parts that people skip.¡±
You will not want to skip anything in William Zinsser¡¯s short essays written for the American Scholar magazine¡¯s website and now collected in ¡°The Writer Who Stayed,¡± a book that begins with him wondering why ¡°every year student writing is a little more disheveled.¡±
One answer is that too few have read Zinsser¡¯s earlier book ¡°On Writing Well.¡± His answer is: ¡°People now get their information mainly from random images on a screen and from random messages in their ears, and it no longer occurs to them that writing is linear and sequential, sentence B must follow sentence A.¡±
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