What makes a good writer?

Decent writing is easy to come by. The grammar is correct and the ideas are adequately communicated. I find decent writing on blogs, in online news stories, in work emails, and even in the books I'm editing. Even adequate language seems to me a neurological miracle, but I did not dedicate ten years of my life to studying how to write just well enough to get by.

While I love to read truly great writing, the work of the masters, I'm not sure it's something I can ever aspire to myself. But to be a good writer? Yes, I can certainly do that. So what elevates someone from mere communication to good writing?

The first thing that comes to mind is a piece of advice from Strunk and White's Elements of Style. "Omit needless words." Looking at the paragraph above, there are plenty that could be removed. Do I really need the the truly to describe truly great writing. Do I need the appositive to tell you that it's the work of the masters? What about certainly? Wouldn't my sentence be stronger if I just quietly said, "I can do that"? Good writing does not pad or fluff. In good writing, each word serves a purpose.

This is not to say that each sentence need only be Hemingway-esque bare bones. There is certainly room, in my writing at least, for a rhetorical flourish here and there to make a point. Perhaps you want to create, through asides and delays, a sense of crescendo that slowly builds, leaving the readers holding their breath until, at last, your point is made. All of my favorite writers, Woolf, Faulkner, Shakespeare, use extremely complex sentences to mirror the tension and complexity of their subjects. There is room for style.

So what makes style, then? It is, I think, a sense of rhythm. It's arranging the words so they have the greatest possible impact. For example, I could have phrased that last sentence as: To have the greatest impact, the words should be carefully arranged. But that just falls a little flat, doesn't it? Impact is the exciting word, so that's what you want to strike the readers with at the very end.

"Write the way you talk." It's age old advice for a reason. We have certain cadences to our speech, verbal tics, and mannerisms that all lend themselves to creating a voice. It's speaking that gives us our rhythms. Often that gets lost when the words are put down on paper.

So how to maintain that natural sense? How do we achieve clarity? The best thing I've found so far is practice. So here we are. Practicing.