Great writing ability is a gift from God that cannot be taught or learned.

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Beyond the most fundamental of amenities as to sentence structure, grammar, syntax and the like, virtually everything that we know that is worth knowing about writing and communication is either intuitive or self-taught.

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What that means is that, after about the third grade, there is very little anyone can teach a student about creative writing.

 I’ve yet to meet the man who was both a good, well behaved, lad at school and afterwards a good and creative writer.

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Being a good lad who pleases teachers at school virtually guarantees that one won’t ever be a good writer as being a good lad at school derives of doing what others who don’t know how to write themselves tell you to do.

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The very education itself obviates against creativity.

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Formal education is designed to produce mediocre writers.

​ ​ And boy does that design work!!

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Almost the entirety of Abraham Lincoln’s education was self-directed.

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Lacking formal schooling, he consumed books with an insatiable desire, reading snatches of them whenever he could.

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He also committed to memory numerous passages from his favorite books.

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It enabled him to learn the musicality present in great writing.

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It’s no coincidence that the mind that produced the Gettysburg Address had at its immediate disposable snippets from the world’s finest authors.

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My family does not think highly of your Mr Lincoln for a number of very compelling reasons but there is no doubt he is the best writer to ever occupy the White House and who likely ever will.

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And he taught himself that craft.

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Try to learn to write this from a schoolteacher:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

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Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war.

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We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

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But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

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The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

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It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

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It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

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— Abraham Lincoln

Nov. 19, 1863

Great writing ability is a gift from God that cannot be taught or learned.

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