Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

We are all environmentalists now, but we are not all planetists. An environmentalist realizes that nature has its pleasures and deserves respect. A planetist puts the earth ahead of the earthlings.

Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.

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

I was standing next to a famed geo-politician when the first news of the Argentine attack [on the Faulkland Islands] was received, and heard him muse incredulously: "An old-fashioned naval battle. A war between two civilized nations, perhaps with even a declaration of war, and later a peace conference. Wow." No hostages, no nukes, no ideologies, no religious fanaticism; just a fair-and-square war over national interests - hard to believe, in this day and age.

Do not put statements in the negative form. And don't start sentences with a conjunction. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all. De-accession euphemisms. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

Took me a while to get to the point today, but that is because I did not know what the point was when I started.