I’ve always liked to write. When I was in elementary school I loved making up stories and spending the whole afternoon putting my ideas down on paper. When I got to high school I found that I liked writing in a journal. In college I found that I really, really liked to write papers. And today, still, I write in many forms–email, blog, irc, and IM.

It’s something that just comes easy and naturally to me. In other subjects like math I have always struggled. Memorizing formulas and doing the same problems over and over again (and getting a different result every time) is pretty frustrating. And yet, I can pick a topic and write about it 10 different times and come up with 10 different essays–and not be bothered by it at all. Weird…

I’ve always been a person that spoke more softly than others and had trouble putting my thoughts into actual spoken words. When I write, I know that I can make as many modifications to my statements as I want. The final draft, the one I present to the world, is the written version of my thoughts modified to perfection. I could never say what I feel the first time. I have to write it down.

In my last semester of college I was asked to give a presentation on “writing with a strong voice”. I wasn’t exactly sure what my professor was asking me. I thought it might have something to do with some small part of the readings I was supposed to do but forgot or skipped. When I asked her to elaborate she simply said to do what I felt was best. This was in May of 2004.

Fast forward 10 months and I find this post by one of my favorite writers. In his brief essay he states everything that I’ve come to believe in over the last 30 years of writing. Interestingly enough, just about everything Mr. Graham writes in the above essay was everything that I mentioned in my final college presentation.

If you have any interest at all in writing well, I highly recommend that you read the entire essay (shouldn’t take you longer than 4 minutes).

Below are what I believe to be the most important ideas:

Write in a conversational tone
Don’t try to sound impressive
Use simple, germanic words

And finally,
Learn to recoginize the approach of an ending, and one appears, grab it.