iter has at last conquered his element, his
personality and his character can be transmitted to paper. What is
said will reflect the force, adaptability, reason and musing of the
writer. In fact, the discipline through which one learns to write adds
substance to thought, whereby one's ideas are given body and
connection. Such common faults as wordiness, overstatement, faulty
sentence structure and weak use of words are gradually corrected. With
their passing, confidence grows. This does not mean, however, that the
task then becomes easy. Though its rewards will increase, good writing
continues to be a strain even to the man who does it well. Many
celebrated men of letters never get beyond the "sweating" stage, but
have to fight their way through a jungle of words, and rewrite almost
endlessly, before finding satisfaction in their product.

This description makes it all seem more than a little formidable. But
what was promised in the first place was that any service officer, who
will accept the necessary discipline, can make himself reasonably
proficient as a writer, and thereby further his professional progress.
What he writes about during the conditioning period makes very little
difference. It might be an operational order one night, a treatise on
discipline the next, a lecture to his men on the elements of combat
the third. Fortunately, the list of topics within the services and
directly applicable to their operations, is practically inexhaustible.
That is a main reason why the military establishment is a better
school for writing than perhaps any other place in our society.

Winston Churchill, whose gift of forceful expression is the envy of
all other writing men, won his literary spurs in his early twenties as
a soldier with the Malakand Field Force. He saw the essential
idea--that to learn English, he had literally to learn, just as though
he had been acquiring Latin or French. As a writer, his main strength
is his employment of Anglo-Saxon, the words of our common speech.

But simply to take regular exercise in composition is not quite
enough. Of it would come the shadow but not the substance. To progress
as a writer, one must become a student of the best things which have
been written by men who understand their craft. A military officer can
do that without going beyond the field of military studies, if that
should be his disposition, such is the richness and variation of
available works in this realm of liter