To write well you must read good writing. Writing is one field in which that old computer programmer s saw Garbage In, Garbage Out clearly applies. That means regularly reading serious, high-quality periodicals such as The Economist , The Nation , The New Yorker , The New York Review of Books , The Atlantic , Harper s , The Times Literary Supplement , Lingua Franca or other important weeklies and monthlies, as well as the quality national and international press such as The New York Times , The Washington Post , The Wall Street Journal , The Financial Times , and similar newspapers. You learn to write well by learning to read well, consciously imitating the style of argument and expression used by established, professional writers. If your normal reading includes only People , Time , and USA Today , it is no mystery why your essays are not getting the marks you want.
Writing requires inspiration.
This is the view one hears most often about writing. But for most people who write, the process is not so much about being inspired as about the laborious, excruciatingly painful task of getting the words from your head to the page and then making sure that they are good. Most writers often feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining , filling up page after page of nonsense, hovering on the edge of insanity, trying over and over again to get their thoughts in order, and succeeding only after many, many rewrites. Inspiration rarely comes into it. Many of us even carry notebooks or slips of paper to note these things down.