I've got the paper back. I read it back in highschool, and I'll recommend it. One passage that stuck with me, was when he spoke about how he taught himself to

I've got the paper back. I read it back in highschool, and I'll recommend it. One passage that stuck with me, was when he spoke about how he taught himself to write. The process was basically to read a page out of a "good book" several times, then close the book and try to reproduce their style... imitate, and iterate as necessary. I tried to do this myself with Ralph "Where's Waldo" Emerson (I was a transcendentalist nut for a while); soon I found my sentences littered with semi-non-semi: colons everywhere. (The scattered use of parens came later.) Also I liked his anecdote about beer delivery services while working in printing presses in Europe.