Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.

Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.

If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.

You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?

I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.

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.

Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author.