The editor recently returned exhausted from TechEd. He tells everyone who will listen that he has worn himself out trying to persuade the great and the good of the SQL Server world to write articles for Simple-Talk.

I can believe it, though I can’t recall the SQL Server expert and writer called Samuel Adams that he keeps mentioning. I know, from my own attempts at trying to find new authors with original voices, that this is not an easy task. However, what we are seeking is not the polished metaphor, but the original and interesting idea, and the enthusiasm to communicate it.

I’m an enthusiastic writer. Not all Database Professionals are so excited by the prospect. I can sympathise; I have, like most people, found it a difficult skill to pick up, but I have to admit that it is one of the more useful skills to have.

Like most skills, it is so badly and flaccidly taught that one weeps for the future of literature. Fortunately, there are manuals that, if followed with determination, allow anyone who can follow instructions to write well. The one I always recommend has the advantage that it was written by one of the funniest, and most successful, writers ever, a British-born Canadian by the name of Stephen Leacock. His daytime job was as professor of Political economy at McGill University. He moonlighted as one of the most popular and widely read magazine writers ever, such that it was once said that more people had heard of Stephen Leacock than had heard of Canada. He earned far more from his hobby than his daytime job.

His advice is hot stuff, and works just as well as when the book was first published, in 1943, near the end of his life. It is normally available second-hand

Because, he was an academic as well as a writer, he was able to give wise advice on a range of writing, from humour to history. Because he was so successful himself with his writing, one gets enough confidence to follow his advice to the letter. I wouldn’t want to ape his style, which is now rather dated but still amusing, but his technique can’t be faulted.

So for any DBA or developer who has an original idea that he knows is interesting to others, but who recoils from the task of writing, then the answer is, as always in IT, RTFM. The best M, by far, being Stephen Leacock’s book ‘How to Write’. Even if you flounder, Simple-Talk will help you out.