To learn to write well is to pursue a connection between your facility with language and the content, intellectual and otherwise, of your character. I do not mean by this that people who cannot write well have no character or that writing is the only way in which people can show their character. I mean, simply, that you cannot write well if you do not make this connection, because not to make it is to fail, as a writer, in holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking. Or, to put it another way, it is to fail to take your own intellect seriously. As a teacher, primarily of writing but also of literature, I measure my success not in how many A’s or B’s I give out—since grades reflect the surface of learning, not necessarily its quality—but in whether my students have begun to take on the responsibility not simply of having ideas, but of having the audacity, because we lie to our students if we do not acknowledge that it takes courage, to attempt to communicate those ideas in words compelling enough to command a reader’s attention above and beyond the fact that they were written in response to a classroom assignment…. As writers, we exercise this responsibility—we hold ourselves accountable—most obviously through the process of revision. In order for revision to be meaningful, however, in order for revision even to be possible, a writer must have a sufficient stake in what she or he is attempting to revise that the work of seeing it anew feels both worthwhile and necessary.

---Richard Jeffrey Newman