The Woman Who Ate Cutlery

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AP Language and Composition The Woman Who Ate Cutlery The book “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser talks about the principals that should be followed in order to write well. The book talks about what most people do wrong in their writing, why they do that, and how to overcome it and learn from it. An article “The Woman Who Ate Cutlery” written by Chrsitine Montross basically talks about a woman who eats silverware and sometimes puts it inside of her to relieve stress and then would go to the hospital for treatment. To see if Chrisitne Montross followed Zinsser’s rules on the key to writing well, I am going to select repetition, the audience, clutter, and simplicity (which all correlate in some ways) as some principals to compare to Christine Montross’s writing, although there are many, many more principals Zinsser wrote about in his book. I will compare what Zinsser’s outlook on the category was and if Montross had the same outlook or if she didn’t. Starting off with repetition, Zinsser saw that as the writer your job was too keep the reader as interested as possible and wanting them to not the close the book until they reached the end of the story. When repetition is brought up in reading it is like your mother when they keep on nagging you to do the chores and repeating it over and over again until you do so. You hate it then and are sure to hate it also when it comes into your reading and the author is not even your mother. You are not going to keep on reading if the book can be done in the first five pages and the rest of the pages is just repetition of those first five pages. To stop repetition according to Zinsser you have to “Believe in yourself, your identity and opinions” (22). The actual definition of repetition according to dictionary.com is the action of repeating something that has already been said or written. What reader will be interested
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