You learn to write by writing.

Writing is hard work.

All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.

Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.

Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five - just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.