We write to find out what we know and what we want to say.

Writing, however, isn’t a special language that belongs to English teachers and a few other sensitive souls who have a “gift for words.” Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly—about any subject at all.

Between English at one end of the spectrum and chemistry at the other are many subjects, like economics, that are a mystery to both camps. Some people would say that economics is also a mystery to the economists. But none of us would deny that economics has a tighter grip on our daily lives than English or chemistry. Shouldn’t we know more about its theories and applications? And how about all those other subjects: anthropology, engineering, mathematics, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, sociology? What can they tell us about how we behave, build, think, govern ourselves and grope for values to live by?

I never stopped to ask, “Who is the typical Yale alumnus? Who am I editing for?” One of my principles is that there is no typical anybody; every reader is different. I edit for myself and I write for myself. I assume that if I consider something interesting or funny, a certain number of other people will too. If they don’t, they have two inalienable rights—they can fire the editor and they can stop reading the writer. Meanwhile I draw on two sources of energy that I commend to anyone trying to survive in this vulnerable craft: confidence and ego. If you don’t have confidence in what you’re doing you might as well not do it.

I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written—in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like the solution to a mathematical problem.

Why, then, would anyone in his right mind want to be a writing teacher? The answer is that writing teachers aren’t altogether in their right mind. They are in one of the caring professions, no more sane in the allotment of their time and energy than the social worker or the day care worker or the nurse.

Writing requires us to operate some kind of mechanism—pencil, pen, typewriter, word processor—for getting our thoughts on paper. It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organize them and present them clearly. It forces us to keep asking, “Am I saying what I want to say?” Very often the answer is “No.” It’s a useful piece of information.

Therefore, for the purposes of this book, I’ll generalize outrageously and state that there are two kinds of writing. One is explanatory writing: writing that transmits existing information or ideas. Call it Type A writing. The other is exploratory writing: writing that enables us to discover what we want to say. Call it Type B. They are equally valid and useful.

I found it consoling after all these years to learn that writers are up against nothing less than the fundamental anarchy of the universe; entropy, prince of disorder, is sprinkling noise on everything we write. Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise. Pomposity is noise. Clutter is noise: all those unnecessary adjectives (“ongoing progress”), all those unnecessary adverbs (“successfully avoided”), all those unnecessary prepositions draped onto verbs (“order up”), all those unnecessary phrases (“in a very real sense”). Information is your sacred product, and noise is its pollutant. Guard the message with your life.

In all territories of thought which science or philosophy can lay claim to, including those upon which literature has also a proper claim, no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.

Long after Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! has come and gone, books like Lewis Thomas’s Lives of a Cell and Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach will still be around, their authors remembered as men of wisdom and stature.

In writing, short is usually better than long. Short words and sentences are easier for the eye and the mind to process than long ones, and an article that makes its case succinctly is the highest form of courtesy to the reader. Somehow it never occurs to sloppy writers that they are being fundamentally rude. Most pieces can be cut by 50 percent without losing any substance.

Number one—a corporate memo I found in my in-box last year—is scandalous in its flatulence.

Down beyond the reach of the sun’s rays there is no alternation of light and darkness. There is rather an unending night, as old as the sea itself. For most of its creatures, groping their way endlessly through its black waters, it must be a place of hunger, where food is scarce and hard to find, a shelterless place where there is no sanctuary from ever-present enemies, where one can only move on and on, from birth to death, through an endless night, confined as in a prison to his own particular layer of the sea.

Lautrec would probably have painted no better than his father if the breaking of both his legs in his teens had not saved him from wasting his life hunting with his cousins.

Such self-pity would have been despised by Mr. Spicer; emotions have no place in mathematics. He was one of those people who have “a head for figures,” instantly certain that twelve times nine is—well, whatever it is. Confronted with a student who was unable to produce the right answer, he would begin to turn red, a man betrayed by his vascular system, until his round face and bald head were crimson with disbelief that such dim-wittedness was at large in the next generation.