If you don't think writing can be taught, then you should read this book.

If you do think writing can be taught, then you too should read this book.

Either way, keep this in mind as you read: WRITE GOOD! is the by-product and end product of countless hours watching my writing students make the same mistakes over and over again while I tried to explain these rules born of tens of thousands of hours of writing.

I have written this book for the greater good of humanity but also so I would never have to explain the rules again. I wrote it selfishly to create shortcuts in my own teaching.

WRITE GOOD! is not meant to be definitive or exhaustive but exists for a more quotidian purpose: to eliminate the most common mistakes in writing.

I hope you will read it, learn it, and then forget it so nothing gets in the way of your words again. Once you know the rules, they become your best friend because they lose their power to confound.

How can that be?

Simple: once rules commingle with your writing DNA, they vanish—you use them in the real world of page and screen without ever thinking twice about it.

The rules no longer slow you down any more than a cloud on the horizon can keep you from your destination here on earth.

Our goal herein is to learn to internalize a handful of critical rules so we can more or less forget them in the act of writing—so they become second-nature whenever (and whatever) you write.

Once implanted in your cerebral cortex, these rules will disappear just as stitches miraculously vanish after surgery that time you fell from out of nowhere. And then the real writing can begin.