a better writer because you recognize that it matters, and
because you've kicked to the curb the dumb notion that only
an anointed few have the chops to be good writers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at the Atlantic, spent
a year teaching writing to MIT students. He later wrote, "I felt
that the rigor of math had better prepared these kids for the
rigor of writing. One of my students insisted that whereas in
math you could practice and get better, in writing you either
'had it' or you didn't. I told her that writing was more like math
then she suspected."
In other words, good writing can be learned—the way
trigonome- try or algebra or balancing a balance sheet is
a skill most of us can master. In an essay at the Neiman
Journalism Lab, "How I Faced My Fears and Learned to Be
Good at Math," Matt Waite writes: "The difference between
good at math and bad at math is hard work. It's trying. It's
trying hard. It's trying harder than you've ever tried before.
That's it."
The same is true about writing.
What you will read in this section is everything I know to
be most important about writing: everything I have learned,
collected, curated, and discovered over 25 years of writing
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Writing Rules: How to Write Better
