Today many of America’s best writing teachers believe that this is the only kind of writing worth teaching, especially to young children. Unlike Type A writing, which they consider mainly a technical skill, Type B writing

One of the underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material. That task is so central to this book

It was drafted by Tom Hayden, whose first version began like this: Every generation inherits from the past a set of problems—and a dominant set of insights and perspectives by which the problems are to be understood and, hopefully, managed.

that writing is primarily an exercise in logic and that words are just tools designed to do a specific job.

Therefore, for the purposes of this book, I’ll generalize outrageously and state that there are two kinds of writing. One is explanatory writing: writing that transmits existing information or ideas. Call it Type A writing. The other is exploratory writing: writing that enables us to discover what we want to say. Call it Type B. They are equally va

Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. It’s a physical activity, unlike reading. Writing requires us to operate some kind of mechanism—pencil, pen, typewriter, word processor—for getting our thoughts on paper. It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organ

Originality and surprise are the most refreshing elements in nonfiction writing. There’s no “right” way to approach the subject of memoir, or the subject of man, or any other subject. A writer who comes at his discipline from an oblique angle is almost always more fun to travel with. Risk gives writing an edge.

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.

Meaning is remarkably elusive. After a lifetime of writing I still revise every sentence many times and still worry that I haven’t caught every ambiguity; I don’t want anyone to have to read a sentence of mine twice to find out what it means.