Writing tips (and trash talk) from Mark Twain

No advice from Buttry this time. I won't try to top the advice that Mark Twain offers in the current issue of "Above the Fold," Laurie Hertzel's outstanding newsletter for the Star Tribune staff in Minneapolis: And it's not just good writing advice. It's some deliciously pointed trash talk aimed at James Fenimore Cooper. Like this one, which says that the rules of literary art "require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as 'the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,' by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the 'Deerslayer' tale."

I won't be sharing this with my "leadership tips" list, because some of them might model that tone in coaching writers.