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

Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be tired. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.

The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead.

Writing, I reminded them, can’t be taught or learned in a vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: “This is how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.” In many subjects, students don’t even know that a literature exists — that mathematics, for instance, consists of more than right and wrong answers, that physics consists of more than right or wrong lab reports.