take a few deep breaths, put your pulse rate into second gear, and deliver a supply of oxygen to the brain.

Conversations stumble; they stray; they repeat; they are bloated with, you know, like, meaningless words; and they are often cut short by intrusions. But what they have going for them is human contact, the sound of a human voice.

Writing should be conversational. That does not mean that your writing should be an exact duplicate of speech; it should not. Your writing should convey to the reader a sense of conversation.

Do not try to write everything about your subject. All subjects are inexhaustible.

“Why am I writing this?”

One common mistake you should be aware of is the writing of two or three leads in the same story. Often a writer creates a good lead and then repeats all the information in the second paragraph, and again in the third. This is from an unpublished article on dog parks:

The best-known one is Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary by Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis. Read that book or one like it.

A lead should be provocative. It should have energy, excitement, an implicit promise that something is going to happen or that some interesting information will be revealed. It should create curiosity, get the reader asking questions.

People is the one subject that everybody cares about.