There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.

Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.

Be grateful for every word you can cut.

Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.

Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.

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.

But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.