Read: the literary equivalent of osmosis

Unlike speech, reading and writing are "cognitively unnatural."

As a human instinct, speech doesn’t have to be taught to an infant. Writing does, because it is not a purely visual process, both reading and writing piggyback on language and speech. 

Anyone who wants to improve their writing needs to read a lot.

Becoming a writer requires reading examples of good prose, giving you something to aspire to and allowing you to become sensitive to the hundreds of things that go into a good sentence that couldn’t possibly be spelled ou...

Most of what gets described as “good writing” is so described because – one way or another – it sounds right. It flows and slows when it should, the stresses fall naturally on the words that the writer wants to emphasize and the reader doesn’t stumble over unintended internal rhymes or clumsy rep...