there’s almost no pedagogical task harder and more tiring than teaching somebody to write.

Another powerful element in learning to write is motivation. Motivation is crucial to writing—students will write far more willingly if they write about subjects that interest them and that they have an aptitude for. But they don’t often get that chance; writing tends to be assigned only in subjects like English or history that are identified with

every discipline has a literature—a body of good writing that students and teachers can use as a model; writing is learned mainly by imitation. Therefore I decided to look for the literature myself: to collect brief examples of good, accessible writing in a variety of academic disciplines.

the common thread is a sense of high enjoyment, zest and wonder. Perhaps, both in learning to write and in writing to learn, they are the only ingredients that really matter.

American children have long been taught to visualize a composition as a finished edifice, its topic sentences all in place, its spelling correct, its appearance tidy. Only lately has there been an important shift. The shift—in the terminology of the trade—is from “product” to “process.” It puts the emphasis where it should have been all along: on

This is how Orwell said the passage would come out in the pompous bureaucratic language of our times: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must

people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.

we write to find out what we know and what we want to say.

this is a book about process: the process of transmitting information clearly and simply. Only by repeated applications of process—writing and rewriting and pruning and shaping—can we hammer out a clear and simple product.