Learning, he seemed to be saying, takes a multitude of forms; expect to find them in places where you least expect them to be. - William Zinsser

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every words that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what — these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank,

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.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.