Writers dream of sentences that sail through the waters of thought. We try to control their shape and size, and we struggle to let them glide, rather than thrash at sea.

Be bold. Be fast. Get to the point right away. The best email communication is simple and clear.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

Writers dream of sentences that sail through the waters of thought. We try to control their shape and size, and we struggle to let them glide, rather than thrash at sea.

I’m a sucker for this stuff. The @ is called chiocciola (snail) in Italian! The & was once taught as a letter of the alphabet! The manicule has been with us for a millennium! Thank you, Keith Houston, for bringing these little mysteries out of the shadows of typographic history.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochures and brilliance, memo and memoir, a ship's log and The Old Man and the Sea. The best writers stamp prose with their own distinctive personality; their timbre and tone are as recognizable as their voices on the phone. To cultivate voice, you must listen for the music of language-the vernacular, the syntactic tics, the cadences.