Different regions may require different strategies, as President Bush has noted, but not different basic principles. It's either collective security or selective security.

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.

Do not be taken in by 'insiderisms.' Fledgling columnists, eager to impress readers with their grasp of journalistic jargon, are drawn to such arcane spellings as 'lede.' Where they lede, do not follow.

A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.

Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace.

A reader should be able to identify a column without its byline or funny little picture on top purely by look or feel, or its turgidity ratio.

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.