“The secret of good writing,” says William Zinsser* author of On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction, “is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.” This means getting rid of every word that serves no function but only weakens your sentence.
I grew up in New Zealand. I was born and raised in the village of Ashhurst, in the Manawatu district. Ashhurst is 14 kilometres from Palmerston North and about 150 kilometres north of Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city. I was brought up Exclusive Brethren, originally called Plymouth Brethren. This is a fundamentalist, Christian group that uses…