When I meet the assistant dean pro tem in the rain, I send and expect signals of fellowship. When I read his latest guidelines for the work of the Committee on Memorial Plaques, I hold in my hands a promise of logic, order, and coherence, and equally a promise that the language I read will be constrained and regulated in such a way as to engender those things. There is no Rule in Heaven that language has to be logical, orderly, and coherent any more than there is some Law of Nature that requires football players to stay within the lines. Your language can be illogical, disorderly, and even incomprehensible in fact, sometimes it should be so but you won t be writing discursive prose. Clear, concise writing is a result of good technique, like an engine that starts and runs.
Good technique requires the knowledge and control of many conventional forms and devices.
They must be conventional because writing is public and enduring, and the path of its thought must be visible to other minds in other times. You do well to keep the subject of your sentence clearly in view just as you do well to keep your powder dry and your eye on the ball. These things work. Furthermore, although such things are matters of technique, they are derived not from some concern for technique but because they go to the heart of the matter. You keep your eye on the ball because it is the ball, and the meaning of the game is known only because of what happens to the ball.