Sublime

Nuts and bolts: strategies for making meaning at the word, sentence, and paragraph levels

Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them. There are people who superimpose their own patterns on the work of writers and seem to think it is their role to force things in the direct

‘Have this evaluate your essay for ideas and content, or for sentence structure, or for organization, and then go ahead and take that feedback—that personalized feedback—and improve your essay.’”

The great American novelist Elmore Leonard summed this up nicely when he said, ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’

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

‘String: a Technique of Communication’ (1960).31

It is an argument that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.

Writers are obviously at their most natural when they write in the first person. Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity. Therefore I urge people to write in the first person: to use “I” and “me” and “we” and “us.” They put up a fight.

“How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”