You’re not stupid.

You know what writing is truly about.

It’s a never-ending battle for your readers’ attention.

Every sentence is a link in a taut chain that connects your headline to your conclusion.

And you are just one weak sentence away from losing your reader forever.

So you take your craft quite seriously.

You ignore all but your best ideas.

You work on each piece of writing for exactly as long as necessary to get it right.

And you edit until your words are crisp and clear.

But what if that isn’t enough?

What if weaknesses remain that are almost impossible to spot?
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You’ve heard the advice a million times, right?

“To write better, study the writing of other great writers.”

And on the surface that makes sense.

Until you actually try to do it.

Seriously, how exactly do you study great writing?

Should you just read other writers and hope their brilliance rubs off through some form of literary osmosis? Should you write out in long hand what others have typed, in hopes of similar spontaneous hand-to-brain absorption? Or should you rely on something more concrete?

Writing well is hard enough, and the last thing you need is ambiguous advice to further complicate the successful-writer puzzle.

What you really need is a cheat sheet. You need a map to help you navigate the successful writing tactics used by the masters.

Fortunately, you can learn many lessons about great writing technique from just one place – the blog post introduction.

Let’s take a look at a specific example.
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