On Writing Well - Part II Chapter 8~10

Part II Methods

Chapter 8 Words Unity

If you went to work for a newspaper that required you to write two or three articles every day, you would be a better writer after six months. You wouldn't necessarily be writing well -- your style might still be full of clutter and cliches. But you would be exercising your powers of putting the English language on paper, gaining confidence and identifying the most common problems.
Unity is the anchor of good writing. You have three choices to keep the unity: pronoun, tense, and mood.

Chapter 9 The Lead and the Ending

The most important sentence in any article is the first one. But take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph -- it is the crucial springboard to the next paragraph.
Every article is strong in proportion to the surplus of details from which you can choose the few that will serve you best -- if you don't go on gathering facts forever. At some point you MUST stop researching and start writing.
Another moral is to look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people.
To just tell a story is such a simple solution for how to write a lead, so obvious and unsophisticated, that we often forget that it's available to us.

Knowing when to end an article is far more important than most writers realize.

The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by suerprise and yet seem exactly right.
For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
You can bring the story full circle -- to strike at the end an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning. But what usually works best is a quotation.

Chapter 10 Bits&Pieces
To be continued.