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."