It was fun and at times disheartening to read all the answers on LinkedIn. Thanks for noticing the question and answering.

I’ve always been a decent writer, but I can tell I’ve improved in the past year and half of blogging. Writing on a really consistent basis makes a big difference. I guess it’s like any skill - the more you do it, the better you’ll get.

You hit the nail right on the head, and I couldn’t have said it better: we write what we read!

I’ve said that to different people for a long long time.

I was not what one would call academically inclined in high school. I was that part of the class that made the upper 95% of the class possible. But even then I liked to write.

I was at a disadvantage though. In my high-school the biggest lesson you were taught in English through all four years was: don’t write run-on sentences. To be honest, to this day I’m not even sure what this means. I took it to mean that if you need more than one “and” to complete a sentence, you should probably start a new sentence.

When I got to college - I was in for a shock. They expected a lot more from their student’s writing and it took me a long while to conform. And it was during this time that I noticed my writing improved whenever my choice in reading material improved.

Eventually I learned how to write “academically” and all was good with the world.

Post-college, I learned about style. Or more to the point - that good writing can take many forms, and some of those forms break with what we were taught were grammatical conventions.

And now that writing for the web is so important, those conventions seem to be even less relevant.

One thing I know about me is that I tend to be a literary mimic. If I spend a weekend reading a bunch of George Will opinion pieces, my writing will be very much different than if I spent that time reading Cracked.com (which can be artfully written in its own right), or even Tom Clancy.

This mimicry of mine can be both a blessing and a curse.

I have a non-fiction book I’ve been writing/playing around with for the past few years. Right now it is mostly a bunch of post-its, handwritten outlines, some relevant newspaper clippings and a few typed chapters all bound by a paper clip.

The problem is I haven’t decided what kind of book it should be.

Looking at the chapters I’ve started I bounce around all over the place. Sometimes it is a third person objective historical look, and at other times it can be a first person narrative full of casual language and idioms (much like my blog postings). And at other times it comes across as a mighty academic tome full of dense language and hard to follow sentences complete with citations.

I think I need to just put everything else down, not read anything for a while, and then see what kind of writing comes out of me naturally.

And as for Lincoln, one book he read a lot was the Bible.

The Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural speech are probably two of the best pieces of American speech writing ever - and you can tell from their pacing and language that he was heavily influenced by biblical verses.

Thanks for stopping by!

One of the best ways to become a better writer is to read great writing. Again, most people don’t take the time to do this, preferring something from Cracked.com to Thomas Hardy or John Steinbeck (my two absolute favorites).

At my high school there were two English tracks - regular and accelerated. I was in the accelerated track, which culminated in AP English senior year. I remember one time in home room, when I was a freshman, the girl I was sitting next to was feverishly working on finishing her essay for her (regular) English class.

She asked me to take a look, and as I read it I was astonished. It wasn’t like it was just a slightly less coherent essay than one I might write in my accelerated English class. It was something completely other - like apples and oranges or chalk and cheese.

It lacked a clear introduction, there was no thesis, no coherent flow of ideas, and on and on. Apparently, as I began to ask her questions, they weren’t being taught those principles in her class. It’s not like she had a thesis that was just poorly worded. She didn’t know what one was!

That moment has stayed with me until this very day. It was then I realized that if you start on one track, you will never, ever be able to cross over into something more sophisticated when the time calls for it. She and I were on divergent paths that would never intersect.

Even though I started off by saying that writing skills need to be taught, I can’t help but think about Abraham Lincoln and The Gettysburg Address, which I read to my son this past week and barely got through without crying. It’s literary perfection; not a word could be improved.

Abe rarely attended school - he simply read every book he could ever get his hands on. That and his natural abilities enabled him to write one of the most profound speeches in the history of written and spoken language.

For the rest of us, though, there’s always room for improvement