On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Source: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/on-writing-well-william-zinsser ↗
Zinsser's book is the most widely read and widely used manual on writing non-fiction in English.
The argument is adjacent to Strunk and White's (simplicity, clarity, honesty) but expanded to the specific problems non-fiction writers face: interviews, memoir, business and technical writing, writing about places and people.
For product direction it is essential — most product documents are badly written non-fiction, and Zinsser's advice is the fastest path to making them less bad.
Read it, keep it on the shelf, reread it after catching yourself writing a bad sentence. The only book about writing most product directors need.
Central argument
Zinsser argues that good nonfiction writing is an act of continuous stripping away: of clutter, of pretension, of words that exist to signal effort rather than convey meaning. The central thesis is that clarity is not a stylistic preference but a form of respect for the reader, and that achieving it requires the writer to first be honest about what they actually think. Across chapters covering interviews, memoir, travel, and technical and business writing, he shows that the discipline is the same regardless of genre — say what you mean, cut everything else, and never hide behind jargon.
Critique
Zinsser's framework is built almost entirely on the norms of literary and journalistic nonfiction, and his conception of good prose is distinctly mid-twentieth-century American in its aesthetic — spare, personal, conversational. This creates a tension when his advice is applied to professional writing in non-Anglophone or highly formal institutional contexts, where brevity can read as insufficient rigor and the imperative to write in a personal voice conflicts with organizational conventions that are not merely bad habits but load-bearing social norms. The book does not seriously engage with the question of when strategic ambiguity or deliberate formality might be the right tool.
Why it matters for product
Product direction generates an enormous volume of consequential nonfiction — strategy memos, discovery readouts, PRDs, roadmap narratives, OKR explanations — and most of it fails not because the thinking is wrong but because the writing buries the argument in hedges, passive constructions, and inflated abstractions that make it impossible for stakeholders to act on. Zinsser's core discipline, forcing writers to identify exactly what they are claiming and cut everything that obscures that claim, is directly applicable to the documents that align engineering, design, and business around a direction. A CPO who writes clearly forces their own thinking to be clearer, and that clarity propagates through the organization.