ABSTRACT
The secret for writing long texts is maintaining interest: that comes from finding a topic that you want to write about. Keeping a writer's journal is an excellent way to explore ideas that you can use in your writing. One way to build confidence as a writer is to practice writing. As William Zinsser explains in his superb book, On Writing Well: An important moral is to look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people. By having more information than you need, you can be picky and use only the best material for your purposes. It also can help prevent you from padding your writing that is, writing in a wordy style. When you're writing academic works, you need to be more careful about the integrity of your sources, about being accurate when you quote others, and about making generalizations that you can support.
