This year is the 50th anniversary of one of the two essential resource books for anyone who wants to write well — E.B.White and William Strunk’s Manual of Style. The other is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Zinsser was a student of White’s and later taught thousands of students using The Manual of Style as a guide. When Zinsser began to write his own book, he was careful to make sure what he wanted to create was distinct from his mentors’, and it is.

When I began The Genius Machine, I found myself in the shadow of both books. I was especially concerned that everything I thought I wanted to say about clear thinking wasn’t already covered by Zinsser. So I took a close look at On Writing Well, searching for one sentence in particular. After several decades, I wondered, “Would it be the same as I remembered it?”

I eventually found the page and the sentence that had stayed with me all those years. “It is impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English.” What I didn’t find, much to my surprise, was anything about what comprised clear thinking. It turns out that Zinsser had left that endeavor for others.

One of my biggest surprises in getting my book in print was that I had joined a new peer group — the Secret Society of Published Authors. One would think I would have been aware of this group, since I had midwifed so many authors. But they had kept this little secret from me. It has been only in the last month or so that I realized I was having a different kind of conversation with this group of people called authors, since I was now one of them. I could even call up people like William Zinsser now, which I wouldn’t have done before.

And so I did. Mr. Zinsser lives and teaches in Manhattan, affiliated with Columbia but also teaching ESL students at the New School, helping all hard-working young people get their senior papers polished. I sent Bill (it’s a Secret Society of Published Authors thing — we’re Bill and Gerry now) a copy of The Genius Machine, hoping he would enjoy it. We spoke this week as he started reading my book.

Zinsser said that there is a crises right now with the generation that he's working with — people who are in high school and college at the moment. He says they’re as bright as any generation, but there’s something seriously wrong. He said he’s never seen anything like it. He believes that he is seeing a generation that doesn’t know how to think. 

Is it possible? Could that be the result from ten years of general dumbing down of the populace? Has the media achieved its final triumph, intended or otherwise? Are we seeing the tail of Generation Y, or is this the edge of something new?