To you, the writer From, Mark Twain

Any writer is constantly trying to improve their "skill with the quill" as it were. There is no place better to gain writing knowledge than from the great writers themselves. Mark twain is not stranger to composition and his Essay, "The Art of Composition" can teach one how to sharpen their skills to be as effortlessly eloquent as Twain.

Mark Twain stresses the “unconscious powers of mind” that begin working when one begins writing. Mark twain writes “leisurely” and it flows naturally from within him. He can't pin down his methods in his mind when he starts writing. He knows they are there but they are not neatly organized and compartmentalized. Still what seems like chaos in the mind leads to an ease of style when writing.

Twain has come up with the idea of the “model chamber” sort of a stash of sentences we have in our mind compiled of every sentence we’ve read. The model chamber is what shapes one's instructional writing. The model chamber is made as we reject uncomfortable sentences, for whatever reason we might find them offensive, and as we accept ones we do like. Twain explains that this process of selection or rejection is done through an other unconscious marvel of the mind; the idea of the“Automatically working taste”. We don't need to consciously say “I like this sentences I’ll put it in my model chamber or I don't like this one-I’ll forget about it”, our mind automatically rejects or accepts them into the model chamber.

What a writer needs to know writing improves and is shaped by all of one's exposure to composition. The more you read and the more you practice writing the better your instinctual writing will be. Our conscious only comes in when editing. In this, reading is ESSENTIAL to being a good writer.

• Twain, Mark, "The Art of Composition"  Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Prose Models 11th ed. Harcourt College Publishers, 1975.