How I Write

 

Back in the fall of 1984, when writing was still an evolving process for me, I took a course in New York University’s School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions (SEHNAP) called Practicum: Teaching Expository Writing.  The class—a ‘practicum’ is a course designed for the preparation of teachers in a particular field that involves the practical application of theory—was taught by Gordon Pradl (1943-2020), a longtime professor of English education at NYU’s ed school.     

I was a new Ph.D. student in the Department of Performance Studies at the time (1983-86) and I was offered a position as a preceptor in the undergrad Expository Writing Program.  (‘Preceptor’ is what the EWP called its teaching assistants.)  The Writing Practicum was a required class for all preceptors who were teaching the mandatory, two-semester Writing Workshop.  Performance Studies grad students were considered a prime pool for prospective EWP preceptors because of the department’s emphasis on writing.

(Expository writing, in the way NYU used the term, is writing that conveys factual information, as opposed to creative writing, such as fiction.  The purpose of expository writing is to explain, inform, describe, or analyze something.  While most expository writing appears in the form of an essay, it’s also the type of writing used in personal and business letters; memos; recipes; reports; news articles; press releases; term papers, theses, and dissertations; textbooks; encyclopedia entries; and almost any other kind of non-fiction written work one can imagine.)

One of the assignments for Dr. Pradl’s Writing Practicum was to describe our “writing process”—in other words, to articulate how each of us went about putting words and ideas on paper “from assignment to conclusion.” 

Because of scheduling, I didn’t take the Practicum until the start of my second year at NYU.  I’d had a year of teaching in the EWP and a year of working under the Performance Studies emphasis on writing.  All the DPS faculty specifically stressed in their classes that all our written work was expected to be of publishable quality, whether or not we intended to submit it to a journal. 

(My first published essay, “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson,” written in May 1984 for a DPS course, was published in the winter 1984 issue of The Drama Review.  I went on to publish in various journals, a number of other essays that were or started as class assignments.  Two were even exam papers!)

Nevertheless, when Dr. Pradl asked that question, I was still going through a serious reevaluation of what I did when I wrote.  Not only had I simply never come to grips with the process as a process, I couldn’t be absolutely sure—or even reasonably sure—that what I thought I did is really what I was doing.  Certainly, it wasn’t likely to remain what I did for very long—I was still leaning. 

Part of the reason for this uncertainty was undoubtedly that I’d never had any instruction in writing prior to NYU.  Like my peers in the ’50s, I learned grammar and vocabulary in primary and middle school, of course, but in high school and college lit classes, we studied writers, not writing.  Composition courses weren’t part of the curriculum.

Writing in high school and undergraduate school wasn’t very demanding with respect to style or presentation; it was all about content: as long as the facts were reasonably correct, the paper was acceptable.  After college, the only writing I did that wasn’t personal, were army reports (military intelligence, the field I was in, demanded a lot of various kinds of reports!), the rhetorical standards for which weren’t very high. 

The first writing I did that made me aware of my prose was my thesis for my Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977.  The written thesis wasn’t the important part of the thesis work, the performance of my “thesis role” was (my MFA is in acting), but I was constrained to write a readable document, if not by departmental or scholarly pressure, then by my own desire to do the best thesis the department had seen. 

I used to describe my own college writing style as “pedantic,” but now I wanted to write “trippingly on the tongue.”  The problem was, I didn’t have any idea how to go about doing that.  I didn’t know how to write the way I thought I wanted to.  I had to learn for myself how to do it.

A subliminal writing influence “to acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness” might have come from the periodicals I was reading at the time, such as Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times Magazine.  They’re less formal than the kind of academic reading a student usually encounters, and they’re easy to read. 

Some of the writers I admired at that time were Times columnists Russell Baker and Anna Quindlen and essayists S. J. Perelman, E. B. White, and James Thurber.  I didn’t imitate the style of those writers, but they all wrote in a conversational tone.  (Notice how many of those writers are humorists.)  

I still hadn’t developed a “writing process,” however.  I don’t know exactly what I did while I was writing; it was all just dumb luck—or osmosis—that I got anything on paper at all.

The next step in my development of a writing process was returning to school for a doctorate.  I started at NYU’s Department of Performance Studies in the fall of 1983 and a required class was Resources and Methods for the Study of Performance.  The course, taught then by Kate Davy (now provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn), essentially covered just what the title indicates but it was also partly a writing class for DPS grad students. 

One of the texts for Resources was William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, which I’d characterize as the writers’ equivalent of Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting: fundamental, practical, commonsensical, and excellent (see my profile, “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In,” posted on Rick On Theater on 28 July 2015).

The constant emphasis on our writing by the faculty, including Davy, couldn’t help but make us conscious of our prose.  My principal instructors were Michael Kirby (1931-97), Brooks McNamara (see “Remembering Brooks McNamara (1937-2009),” 3 June 2009), and Richard Schechner, who all were editors or former editors of The Drama Review, a premier theater journal published in the department. 

Alongside TDR, another publication, Women & Performance, founded in 1983, is also published by DPS.  With two scholarly journals as part of the environment of my department when I was first learning to think like a writer, the Resources and Methods course, the urgings of my professors, trying to teach the skill to others in the Expository Writing Program, and, later, taking Dr. Pradl’s Practicum, I began to conceive a process of composition.

In addition to Zinsser, by far my strongest influence in this reeducation endeavor, I read other writers on writing: Peter Elbow and William Safire (who wrote not so much about writing as language) and the old standbys Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. 

It’s not surprising, I suppose, that I ended up following a pretty standard procedure for putting ideas and words on paper: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, proofreading.  Of course, that’s a simplistic description, and even at that, the details have changed over time.  Still, tried and true works, so why not?

One thing whose effect became really clear immediately was technical.  Just before I started the Practicum, I bought myself a computer-word processor.  That first word processor changed my writing fundamentally even as I was just learning how to do it.   

The impetus for getting the computer was eminently practical.  In the fall of 1983, I wrote a column for the departmental newsletter; the subject’s irrelevant, but it was a voluntary project, not an assignment.  It was all of three pages, and I wrote it by hand, then typed the draft. 

I cut-and-pasted the first draft, re-edited it, typed it again, re-edited it again, and retyped it again.  Three drafts of a three-page piece of writing that I didn’t even have to do!  That was a lot of work for a freebie.

I was very aware that my Qualifying Exams, the DPS equivalent of “comps,” were coming up in a year.  The Performance Studies Qualifying Exams were three 10-page essays of publishable quality which we had to write in ten days.  I’m not even a touch-typist—there was no way I could research, draft, and edit three acceptable essays in 10 days if I had to get it to a typist in time to get them photocopied—I had to provide a copy for each member of the DPS faculty—and turn them in.

After that, there would be the doctoral dissertation.  My MFA thesis, for which I hired a typist, was only 44 pages long, but the Ph.D. dissertation was a whole different beast.  The only way I could see to succeed at these two vital tasks was this new technology, the word processor.  Of course, I’d need time to learn how to use it, so now was the time to get one. 

In December 1985, I got the exam essays done on time and one of my teachers told me later that though the department didn’t distinguish between levels of success, if it did, I’d have passed with distinction.  The computer allowed me to do that.

As soon as I got the word processor, I found that I wrote more avidly, and sometimes more words as well, because it was fun.  I would often find that I’d worked for hours without stopping because there wasn’t any effort required to type the words onto the screen.  I’d been using an IBM Selectric, but even the best electric machine required effort and my fingers and hands got tired.

I didn’t count drafts anymore because it all became one, flexible draft that reformed itself every time I made a change—until I decided it was finished, and sent it to the printer.  Since there was no retyping every time I wanted to edit a draft, I did far more editing and revising.  Where I’d used to give up on a change because it was too tedious to make—say, changing a small word or reversing the order of two sentences—I now pushed a couple of keys, and I’d have exactly what I wanted, instead of what I’d settle for. 

I won’t even get into the changes in doing footnotes, numbering lists, alphabetizing, keeping margins straight, and not ruining a page by typing too close to the bottom.  It wasn’t as easy then as it is now, but I could change font sizes, even typefaces, without even changing typing elements; a standard electric typewriter couldn’t even do that, of course.

So, just as I was piecing together a workable process for writing, it was changing.  I was convinced it was for the better—and I think it has proved to be. 

Actually, I don’t think the basic process changed so much as it got streamlined and condensed.  The drafting-and-revising stage is the clearest example.  Cutting-and-pasting became an electronic operation instead of a messy, time-consuming, actual scissors-and-tape job.

Another advantage the word processor provided me was the facility to start my writing wherever I wanted—where I felt most confident.  Since I could insert paragraphs wherever I needed, I could start in the middle of the piece and go back later and add a beginning.

Beginnings, it would turn out, were one of my problem areas.  I would eventually develop strategies for dealing with this problem, but back at the start of my transformation into a writer, I didn’t have any—at least not consciously.

When I started writing my master’s thesis, I was terribly blocked at first—I didn’t know how to start.  I finally convinced myself that I had to get started somehow, and I decided I would just begin.  I would simply start putting words on paper as swiftly as I could and worry later about whether they were grammatical and made sense. 

I didn’t know it then, but what I was doing was freewriting about the role and my performance, a strategy I later learned is called focused freewriting.  It’s a prewriting tactic that I still use today.  Soon, the ideas all just began to gush out. 

Here was another benefit I derived from working with a word processor.  I used to agonize over each word, each sentence, each paragraph, and I couldn’t move on until I was reasonably satisfied with the result.  I’d scribble a draft, rewrite it on the blank line above the first attempt, maybe cut-and-paste, reread it—sometimes aloud—and cross out more and rewrite again. 

With the computer, first of all, I no longer even needed to be concerned if the first version wasn’t right yet because I could go back later and revise it or even cut it—no harm, no foul.  Second, if I had an idea while I was working, I could go right back and rewrite the sentence or ’graph and go right back to work where I’d left off. 

This development went a long way to helping me resolve another writing problem I had.  You see, like a lot of people, my mind works faster than my fingers, even on a computer keyboard, let alone a typewriter.  While I was struggling over words and sentences I’d already composed, I would sometimes forget what I was thinking of saying next.  Moving along without the obsessive rewriting prevented me from forgetting many of the ideas I had.

I still have the problem, not only when I stop to revise in mid-write—which I no longer do as a rule—but whenever I stop, say for an errand or a meal or sleep, or even when I’m working on one idea and the idea for the next section just evaporates before I can get to it.  Sometimes I can retrieve the thought, but sometimes it’s just gone.

Since I know I have this tendency, now I occasionally make a note about an idea I want to get to next.  I used to write it on a slip of paper, sometimes on a Post-it which I’d stick on the draft.  Now, with the computer, I just type the note to myself in the spot where I want to add the thought. 

The basic process through which I work when I write an essay of any length developed over a couple of years, principally the years I was in residence at NYU.  (We did a lot of writing in Performance Studies; every course had at least one paper, and most had two or three short ones and one term project.) 

I continued to follow the process after I left school and wrote mainly for publication, but I condensed it a little over time.  (As I noted, the computer also streamlined the working method, but that happened organically and quickly.)  Still, the basic steps remained, just not always discretely.

prewriting.  As soon as a writer, including a student writer, decides to write, whether it’s an assigned task or something she or he’s inspired to write, prewriting begins.  This covers anything a writer does before putting words in sentences on paper or screen.

Fundamentally, prewriting starts me thinking and planning for my writing.  I start to explore my ideas about my topic and gather additional information.  I begin to organize my material.  It’s important to note, though, that all this is tentative and flexible: I can change any of it as I progress and discover or encounter new thoughts.

Prewriting might include making an outline, doing research, reading or watching related material, and making notes.  It might also involve determining what has already been published on the subject, a procedure that’s often required for proposals for theses and dissertations as well as articles submitted for publication.

I accomplish some of these prewriting tasks not only before writing begins but also as it’s beginning.  Reading pertinent material is often on-going, particularly when one piece of literature leads me to another I hadn’t known about earlier.  On big projects, I have also continued to do research while I’m writing.

One prewriting task that almost has to occur before any writing happens is idea generation.  Clearly, if I know from the outset what I want to write about, this step is less imperative, but for assigned writing, that may not always be the case. 

When I set out to write my MFA thesis, I knew my subject intimately, but I still didn’t know how to write about it.  I didn’t know about any of these procedures yet, but I instinctively applied a form of idea generation, and even hit upon a known technique for getting started.

There are many techniques for engendering ideas: freewriting, focused freewriting, brainstorming and list-making, subject-mapping.  I’m not going to discuss all of these (mostly because I don’t use them, but they’re common writing terms and readers can look them up in writing texts and on line).  I do use the first two tactics on the list.

Freewriting, unlike other prewriting techniques, is writing in sentences and even paragraphs (brainstorming results in lists of words and phrases; subject-mapping uses diagrams and lines).  I write for at least 10 minutes about whatever comes to my mind without stopping.  I try not to change anything I’ve written, though the temptation to edit is hard for me to resist.  I try not to be concerned about grammar, punctuation, or spelling.

I actually don’t use plain freewriting much, since I usually have a subject in mind.  What I did to break the writer’s block I experienced at the start of my thesis was focused freewriting, which is the tactic I use mostly to get started.  It’s a way to find out what’s generally known about the subject, what I know about it before I do any reading or research.

Concentrating only on my topic, I write down what I know, making free associations as I go along.  Ideally, I don’t censor my thoughts.  I write for about 10 minutes, then stop and underline one sentence.  For the next 10 minutes of freewriting, I focus on that idea.  I repeat this process as often as I need to until I feel I have something concrete enough to build on.

Counterintuitively, this exercise often actually generates useable writing.  It may not be the start of the essay or article, but it frequently ends up somewhere in the composition—cleaned up grammatically and rhetorically, but the ideas remain.  Not always, though.

drafting.  Using the ideas and plans he or she developed during the prewriting phase, the writer begins composing.  He or she refines the organization first devised in the outline, if the writer made one.  In the drafting phase of the composing process, the writer should consider only the content and ignore grammar, punctuation, and spelling to create a first draft of the composition.

This step is an exercise in discovery.  Writing the first draft of the composition is when the writer assembles most of the information he or she will use in the finished piece.  This is an exploration.

This is the step in which I get the ideas on paper or screen, composed in sentences and paragraphs.  I organize the ideas into coherent groups.  Inevitably, I pay attention to style while I’m writing the first draft, even though I know I shouldn’t, but the real concentration on this comes as I’m revising.  I’m mostly concerned that what I say can be read and understood by anyone with a general familiarity of the topic. 

As I noted, I try to consider only the content of my work at this stage, not the grammar, punctuation, or spelling—though both the word processor’s review applications and my own proclivity make it problematical that I’ll completely ignore mechanics.

I also try to keep pressing ahead and not stall over vocabulary or mechanics (my old habit) so I can focus on getting the ideas down.  As I write, I allow new ideas to develop and, if they’re pertinent to the section on which I’m currently working, I insert them as they occur.  If they apply to earlier or later sections of the paper, I make a note in my outline (or even right on the draft, since I can delete it later when I’ve taken care of the addition).  

The first draft is a “discovery draft” in which I find out not only new ideas about the topic of which I hadn’t thought at the start, but also how I feel about the subject and new ways of looking at it.  In my play reports on Rick On Theater, I frequently comment that I don’t know exactly how I feel about the play or the performance I saw, but that in writing about it, I figure that out.

While I’m working on the draft, I refine my organization occasionally for unity (keeping related ideas and points together) and coherence (keeping the writing logical and rhetorically consistent).

revising.  After completing the draft, the writer reads it over and decides what ideas need to be improved, expanded, or eliminated.  Many writers feel that this is the step in the writing process when they truly learn to write. 

It’s often a good idea to read the draft aloud to get a sense of how the prose flows (or doesn’t).  Readers read with their ears as well as their eyes and brain; they hear what’s been written, like reading poetry or song lyrics.

After reading through the draft, the writer adds new points and more specific details.  Specifics make the writing concrete rather than vague and airy.  Some ideas must be dropped either because they don’t really fit the point or the argument, or they don’t advance the thesis, the essay’s main idea about which the writer’s trying to inform the reader.

The writer then reorganizes the material for a better, more logical arrangement.  The criteria are still unity and coherence.

At this point, the writer creates a second draft—and revises that.  This time, she or he revises for style: better diction (choice of words); smoother, more flowing phrasing; eliminating clichés and redundancies (saying the same thing over and over again); adding detail and specifics; correcting the grammar; straightening out the sentence structure; and so on.

Depending on how long or complex the essay is, the writer will create further drafts and revise them as well.  There’s no limit to the number of drafts and revisions the writer will make before she or he’s satisfied.

When I revise, I focus first on content and organization.  Does each paragraph contain a single, clear thought?  Have I focused on a single main idea?  Do I have an effective opening or “lead” (sometimes spelled lede in journalistic jargon)?

Are there specific facts, examples, incidents, definitions, and other details?  Have I cut out material that is not on the topic or that repeats points I’ve already made?  Have I arranged the material in a logical order?  Have I ended with an effective conclusion?

I’ve acknowledged that leads, that is, getting started, are one of my most pervasive difficulties.  I’ve gotten better at it over time, but it can still hang me up.  One piece of advice that Kate Davy passed along in Resources and Methods has helped immensely: “Leads are more a ‘manipulation’ than an introduction.”  The opening gambit is meant to “hook” the readers, get them interested in what you’re going to say.

She provided some suggestions that have worked quite well for me, among them: relate an anecdote, present a provocative (and relevant) quotation, and issue a challenge.

My second most difficult writing problem, though, is endings or conclusions.  Even now, some of my pieces don’t actually end at all.  They just stop.  Again, Davy came to the rescue, explaining, “A conclusion is not a summary.”

(Does anybody remember the recommended essay structure from high school and maybe also college: “Tell the readers what you’re going to say, say it, then tell them what you said”?  Wrong!)

A conclusion “should have a feeling of winding down.”  Davy again gave us some practical suggestions: a quotation (but this one shouldn’t lead on to anything), a rhetorical question, a speculation. 

Next, I concentrate on style: Have I used necessary transitions and connections?  Have I used key words to help create unity?  Have I avoided short, choppy sentences?  Or (more likely in my case), long, windy ones?  Have I avoided unnecessarily repeating words or phrases?  Have I used clichés and hackneyed or over-used expressions?

I look carefully for words I can cut out (clutter) and language I can make less stiff and simpler.  Have I avoided informal language, slang, and jargon?  (When writing for ROT, though, I use more informal diction, including slang, than I would for an academic paper or an article for publication.  I want the posts to sound more conversational.)

Finally, I look for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors—including typos (because I’m still not a touch typist!).  Now, in the era of spell- and grammar-checkers, I take special care to spot errors where I type actual words, but the wrong ones—I’m always typing but for by and and for an—because spell-checkers won’t flag those (though grammar-checkers will sometimes).

Have I eliminated sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and comma splices?  (These aren’t errors I often make—though I will occasionally write fragments deliberately.)  Do the verbs agree with their subjects?  Have I used the correct pronouns?  Have I used capital letters correctly?

As I’ve said, this is the step in my writing method that was most affected by my switch from handwriting and typing to the computer.  Though I noted above that drafting and revising is a repeated process—remember my little three-page newsletter article that took three full drafts?—once I started using a word processor, drafting and revising, rather than being a series of repeated but separate steps, became one process that just went on as long as I needed it to.

editing.  In this penultimate step in the writing process, the writer checks over his or her grammar, punctuation, and spelling thoroughly one more time. 

Even with the grammar and spelling guides embedded in all word processors now, it’s still useful to keep a grammar reference and dictionary handy.  The reason is that computer spell-checkers, as I pointed out, can’t distinguish between homonyms or words that are anagrams for one another (lemon and melon; listen and silent).

Grammar guides with the word processor follow a set of rules that don’t vary from instance to instance.  Grammar isn’t a matter of inflexible rules or laws; it’s based on convention, the way which things are usually done by common agreement.  The writer may have good reason to ignore convention and disregard the grammar-checker’s advice or “correction.” 

The computer guidance can also be plain wrong because the machine can’t analyze the syntax in its programming and a similar syntax the writer intended; it will flag correct punctuation or word form simply because it doesn’t understand.

When I do my final edit, I read through the essay for readability.  I may read it aloud because if I trip over my own prose, a reader certainly will, too.  (If I have time, I put the paper aside for a few days so I can reread with fresh eyes.) 

I put myself in the place of a reader, reading my composition objectively, as though I hadn’t written the paper.  I try to read as though I’d never seen the paper before.  I ask myself questions I imagine the reader will ask; if the answers aren’t in the paper, I look for places to put them in. 

I pay attention to whether my writing reads smoothly and proceeds from one point to the next logically and fluently.  Have I made the point that I wanted to make?  Is the essay going to be comprehendible for its likely audience?

Beginnings and, to a lesser degree, endings, which I’ve identified as problem areas for me, often have to be worked on, smoothed out and polished, but my most consistent problem is writing too much—I tend to run off at the mouth—so cutting during the editing step has become the most important revising technique in my process. 

In the final stage of editing, I give my grammar a last look for correctness.  I’m pretty good with grammar, but there are always questionable instances that need reconsideration—not to forget those pesky typos.

I’m less confident in my spelling, though I’ve gotten better over the years.  (I have certain spelling problems about which I’ve long known—ie/ei words and -ede/-eed words, for example—and I always check those specifically.) 

I also always check and recheck the spelling of personal names (Richard Rodgers has a d in his last name; Eugene O’Neill has two l’s in his; Barbra Streisand had only two a’s in her first name, not three); titles of books, movies, and plays; the names of companies and businesses (especially theaters and theater companies—which ones use theatre in their names, like most Broadway houses, and which ones use theater, as New York City’s Public Theater does).

I check the paper to be sure I’ve correctly used all punctuation marks.  I especially check quotation marks and parentheses to be sure I included the closing marks (because I still sometimes forget).  I also check that I’ve used capital letters correctly, as well as italics, abbreviations, and numerals. 

If I’ve used quotations, I double-check them to be sure I’ve transcribed them right.  If I’ve edited the quotation, I make sure I’ve marked those changes properly (brackets for insertions, ellipses for deletions).  If the paper uses source-documentation notes, I check that mine are accurate and correctly formatted for the publication or the professor.

proofreading.  This is the last step in the writing process, and the writer rereads her or his last draft to be sure there are no errors remaining—particularly those resistant typos.  (There’s a psychological phenomenon known as “closure” that causes us to read what we think should be on the paper, but isn’t.  It makes us insert missing words or correct misspellings in our minds, and we can read the same sentence over and over and not see the mistake unless we focus very closely.)

Proofing is reading strictly for errors, and it’s a good idea for the writer to reread several times, once for each kind if writing problem: once just for spelling and typos, say, once for punctuation problems, once for subject-verb agreement or verb-tense consistency, and so on, as necessary.

After working on several papers, the developing writer should begin to identify the kinds of mistakes that are habitual in her or his work.  Many, the writer will learn to avoid in the first draft stage, but others may persist, and proofreading specifically for those is wise.

I don’t proofread for content.  I will have taken care of those issues when I edited, if not while I was drafting and revising.  As I said above, I know certain words are hard for me, and I make some punctuation errors consistently as well.  I check for those first.

I read slowly to take in each letter of each word and each punctuation mark.  I read line by line, sometimes using the cursor to guide my eye to individual words, syllables, or even letters.  If I have to, I’ll pronounce each word aloud.

I won’t try to proof more than a line at a time, often only a sentence or even a phrase, no more than my eye can take in at one glance.  I take in punctuation and grammar as I proofread, looking up anything of which I’m not certain.

When I’m finished proofing the piece, I’ll read it through once more, perhaps out loud again.  This is my last chance to make any changes or corrections before the final stage of the writing process: submitting or publishing.  Anyone who’s written an article for publication will know that once the publisher accepts the submission, the writer no longer owns the piece; the publisher does.  The writer can no longer make changes (unless the publisher or the editor requests them).  Until I send the paper off, it’s still mine.

In Poor Richard’s Almanac (1738), Benjamin Franklin wrote: “If you would not be forgotten . . . , either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”  Whether or not I’ve accomplished the latter achievement, I’m afraid, will be up to someone else.  I hope I’ve occasionally accomplished Franklin’s first criterion for a measure of repute.  If so, it’s largely down to the method I’ve tried to describe here.  I will add one other pertinent quotation, from 1682’s “Essay on Poetry” by poet and politician John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham and Normandy:

Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
  Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.

[I’ve published quite a few posts on writers and writing on Rick On Theater.  I won’t list them all, but I will reference the ones I wrote myself, especially the ones covering my own writing.  My profile of William Zinsser (28 July 2015) is already mentioned above; in addition to that, I wrote “Writing” (9 April 2010) and “Why Write” (4 March 2013).]