Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.

To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.

Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."

Good writing is lean and confident.

People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.

Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.