I am a practicing technical writer. Over ten years, my profession has taught, and taught again, and again reaffirmed that writing is very hard work.

The hard in "hard work" refers not to writing but to choice. Choice, in writing as in life, is hard because it exposes you to uncertainty. I originally started this post with "I am a technical writer," and then, I deliberately chose practicing. I like to think of practicing my profession as a judge practices jurisprudence. The choice of discarding one word in favour of its equivalent might alter the course of your piece for the better. Or worse.

I like words. More personally, I like how words sound when they are strung together. The title of this blog is my dedication to the book of the same name that awakened me to the sonority of words. William Zinsser has my eternal gratitude for saying in so many few words that when people read, they actually hear. Listen…err…read this aloud.

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:

And tell me if it’s possible to resist the sheer seductive power of this appeal, which led Thomas Nashe to say this about Marlowe: No leaf he wrote on but was like a burning glass to set on fire all his readers. Or this, which, Zinsser says quoting E.B White, has survived for more than a century: these are the times that try men’s souls. I’m not Thomas Paine to get anywhere close to crafting such immutable lines but attempting doesn’t hurt. Exquisite writing flows from simplicity. Which in turn flows from a cultivated negligence about grammatical nuances.

This blog will showcase such brilliant written gems starting with some personal favourites. Cutting across genres. That includes finely-crafted items from the world of technical writing. In some circles, The C Programming Language is regarded as a classic, a model for technical writing. No genre is taboo or out of bounds for this blog. Elegance and clarity of expression are values I hold dear. The medium is the message. Yet, because I have been a technical writer for a long time, this blog will appear partial to technology-related writing and will focus on such things as user experience and design and take you on a tour of the landscape of the information technology complete with panoramic visuals as also the rugged edges and deceptive cliffs.

You write best when you write for yourself. And so I throw this blog open to all addicts of the written word. Join me, comment, share what you’ve discovered or written, discuss, diss, and in general, have a good time.