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reverse, of course, can also be true. On September 11, 2001, when asked how many firefighters New York City had lost, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani would say that he didn’t have the figure yet, but it was certain to be “more than we can bear.” That morsel of extraordinary diction—the choice of the word “bear”—would help make the mayor the most respected public official in the United States.
    I told my class of writers to think of a compressed spring. When expanded, the spring can do nothing; potential energy is only created when the thing is compressed. The most powerful writing is that which has been cut to its essence. The writer must discard much of what he does. Is that the case in any other field of endeavor? Writers know to be suspicious of any seemingly clever turn of phrase. Are accountants told that? Must they, as an old writing teacher of mine liked to put it, knock down their own sand castles? Are medical researchers cautioned to kill their darlings? (“I came up with a cure for cystic fibrosis over the weekend, but I chucked it out. I don’t know . . . It just seemed too pat.”)
    The class was still with me. I could feel their apprehension and sense their resolve. In this class, they thought, they would finally slay their writing demons. College instructors, even newly minted ones, know when they are falling flat and I certainly was not. I had them convinced, at least for the moment, that good writing was the most important thing in the world.
    The contradictory instructions, I warned the students, will never stop coming. Exhaust your topic, cover it thoroughly—but at all costs avoid tangents. Stay focused, adhere to your thesis—but illustrate with very detailed examples. Be vivid in your language—but not wordy. Be tightly organized—but remember that some memorable writing results from serendipity.
    Writing is difficult because the smallest infelicities—repetition, bits of ambiguity, parallelism out of whack—can harden into speed bumps, slowing the reader down and distracting from the content. Prose must go down like honey. Take another look: “When expanded, the spring can do nothing; potential energy is only created when the thing is compressed.” The spring/the thing—is it a rhyme, a typo, a what? The reader will slow down, perhaps by an amount so small as to be immeasurable, but for the duration of that sentence, the rickety girder work of the prose overwhelms the meaning. A careful writer can wrestle with a sentence like that all day, ending up in one of those weird positions writing puts you in, wishing that springs had been called something else.
    Finally, I told them, writing is hard—and writing courses are hard—because really there is no such thing as college-level good writing. There is no such thing as beginner’s-level or intermediate good writing. Writing is either good or it is bad. Good writing has something fine and profound about it. The homeliest classroom assignment, composed well, written with honesty, carefully crafted, can put us in the mind of Thoreau.
    And now for the last word, the most demoralizing fact of all. Even when writing is technically without fault, it can be not much good. When I was a young teenager, my sister, eight years older and a marvelously impressive figure, sat down at the huge Smith-Corona she’d gotten for Christmas and began writing a novel. I was speechless with admiration. She wrote a chapter or two and abandoned the project. I asked her what had happened.
    She considered a moment and sighed, “It just all seemed so pedestrian ,” she said.
    Her phrasing has stayed with me all these years. What better way to describe the dull, weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable way that our own writing often strikes us? Pedestrian. If she had brought that level of inspiration to the actual composition, she’d have written one corking novel! It’s all been done