The best books for achieving writing excellence

The work of Anders Ericsson changed my life. In this book, he describes his research into how certain people become really good at what they do. They all use one particular approach to achieving excellence. First, through a teacher, they learn the specific skills they need for their chosen activity. Then, they devote large amounts of time to practicing each skill to the point of mastery. Finally, with more practice, they learn to put all the skills together.

This way of learning is familiar to anyone who’s played a sport or a musical instrument. But it had never been applied to writing. Inspired by Ericsson’s work, that’s what I did, first with my own writing, then in classes I taught, and finally in my book listed above.

My debt to this book is huge, and my gratitude to Professor Tufte is boundless. From this book, I learned much of what I now know about the possibilities of the English sentence. Appositives, nominative absolutes, left- and right-branching sentences, inversions: These techniques and many more became a regular part of my writing practice. I delighted in exploring them and seeing what they could do for my writing.

Eventually, I became familiar enough with them to be able to pass them on–through practices I invented and taught my students. Undergrads, graduate students, working adults, aspiring creative writers: they all benefited. Eventually, these same techniques and practices took book form in my book above.

Had this book not been written, I would probably never have learned about Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his research; my own work—even my life—would have been much poorer. Colvin’s book (appearing years before Peak) was the first to introduce Ericsson to a wide audience. Although many similar books followed, in my mind, this is the best. It’s extremely well-researched and written, full of lively anecdotes and fascinating information about how “world-class performers” get to that level.

I especially enjoyed Colvin’s story of how Benjamin Franklin trained himself to become a better writer by imitating the work of the best stylists of his day. Imitation of experts, as Anders Ericsson later discovered, turns out to be a key technique for gaining expertise in any activity.

Decades ago, when I was a young and confused college writing instructor, I found this book; although later in my teaching career, I developed a different approach from Elbow’s, I’ll always be grateful to him for this foundational book. Elbow was one of a number of teachers at the time who realized the need to show inexperienced writers that writing is not a one-step, blank-page-to-final-draft affair; it’s a process.

Elbow’s technique of freewriting now appears in every writing workshop. Other techniques from the book, especially focused freewriting and considering the audience, are less well-known but extremely useful. This book gave me my start as a writer and writing teacher.

“Classical English rhetoric”? When I first discovered this book years ago, I had no idea what those words meant. But when I opened the book to browse, I found a treasure of techniques for writing powerful sentences. Many of these techniques are based on a fundamental idea of repetition; once I started practicing them, I couldn’t stop because they were so much fun! I learned to ignore their off-putting Latin names and concentrate on using them.

So many people have been told by classroom teachers that they should never repeat a word or phrase. However, repetition is a highly effective way of emphasizing something. We do that all the time in ordinary speech. With this book, I learned several dozen ways to create emphasis in writing, too.