I picked up the book a few months back when I was at a second hand book store looking for some basic herb gardening books for one of my students. I found the herb books and couldn't pass up On Writing Well because I kept seeing the name pop up in other writers' books about writing. As a teacher and wanna-be editor I figured that the book would give some insight to the writing trade.
I liked Zinsser's basic philosophies on writing: keep it simple, but fresh, trust your gut, and be concerned about quality and the rest will follow.
On the otherhand, while I'm a nerd for the topic, I felt that the book was 50-100 pages longer than it should have been. I'm a stickler for concise writing and for the book being on its 6th edition, I felt that the quality suffered because of his desire to let the reader sample so much of other authors' writing. I felt that the "samples" became gluttonous and often overwhelmed the message. I enjoyed Zinsser's essays within the book, particularly one about Timbuktu, but I felt that using such long excerpts was destracting and tip-toed the line of self promotion.
I did highlight and bookmark several segments to share with my students and I even toyed with the idea of requiring parts of the book for reading, but then as I caught myself drifting and becoming disengaged at times, I couldn't rationalize requiring the book, or even whole chapters, as required reading.
