Mark Tredinnick - The Little Red Writing Book-University of New South Wales Press (2006)

Most writers spend too much time trying to write as someone
else might—as they imagine they are supposed to write as a lawyer,
as a businessperson, as a professional, as a journalist, as a student, as
a mother, as a father, as a writer. And that’s when they drop the ball.
That’s when their writing grows dull. And the person for whom it’s
dullest of all is the man or woman composing it. Whenever your
writing bores you, stop.
What each of us needs is the confidence to write more like
ourselves; like one intelligent human being—this intelligent human
being with the pen—speaking with care to another.As Charles Darwin
did, who appears to have become the hero, suddenly, of my chapter.
Here’s an example of some good contemporary writing from a
psychology textbook:
As I look at the top of my desk, what strikes me is a continuous
field of light, varying from point to point in amplitude and
wavelength. But I see the scene neither as a continuous field nor as
a collection of points, and I certainly do not see it as existing on my
retinas. Instead, I see objects: a word processor, a pencil, a stapler,
and a pile of books. The objects look solid, and they appear to
occupy definite positions in the three-dimensional space atop my
desk.
My experience is no illusion. The objects I see on my desk really
exist and are located precisely where I see them. I can prove that:
With vision as my only guide, I can reach out directly to the pencil
and pick it up … Sensation entails the registration and coding of
light, sound, and other energies that impinge on the sense organs …
The ability to interpret this information, to extract from it
meaningful and useful representations of our world, is called
perception.
—Peter Gray, Psychology, 2nd edn
Lore 37