Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All

this moment of finding out what we really want to say by trying in writing to say it.

fact-bound writer can’t go: worlds of imagination, rumination and fantasy. In return we enter into a more forgiving contract with him, allowing him to come at his subject slowly, discursively, obliquely, elliptically or just plain densely if that’s his vision. Density, in fact, is one of the qualities that William Faulkner’s fans most like about

Students often feel guilty about modeling their writing on someone else’s writing. They think it’s unethical—which is commendable. Or they’re afraid they’ll lose their own identity. The point, however, is that we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become. But nobody

What a lift that opening gives us. We’re off on a trip with a writer who savors his material, and no element in writing is quite so contagious.

Rewriting it on the spot, he got personal and specific and created a classic: We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

Memory and intuition and chance associations will always generate a certain percentage of what any writer writes. The remainder is generated by reason.

a career of trying to write clearly and—as an editor and a teacher—to help other people to write clearly. I’ve become a clarity nut.

They are in one of the caring professions, no more sane in the allotment of their time and energy than the social worker or the day care worker or the nurse. Whenever I hear them talk about their work, I feel that few forms of teaching are so sacramental; the writing teacher’s ministry is not just to the words but to the person who wrote the words.

Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content; the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.)