Research is pure exhilaration. Writing is sheer drudgery. Most genealogists hate writing.
Most people hate it.
A sage once described the chore as 5 percent inspiration and 95 percent perspiration. Yet, to be genealogists, we must write. We must know the mechanics of writing, as well as a lot of irksome rules we tried to ignore in school. Machines don t write prose that humans want to read. Toward that end, this column s focus is not on those rules we can glean from any self-help book but on a few particulars peculiar to our field.