Writing is at the very least a knack, like drawing or being facile on the piano. Because everybody can speak and form letters, we mistakenly suppose that good, plain, simple writing is within everybody's power. Would we say this of good, straightforward, accurate drawing? Would we say it of melodic sense and correct, fluent harmonizing at the keyboard? Surely not. We say these are "gifts." Well, so is writing, even the writing of a bread-and-butter note or a simple public notice; and this last suggests that something has happened within the last [sic] hundred years to change the relation of the written word to daily life.
(Jacques Barzun, "English as She's Not Taught," in Atlantic Essays, ed. Samuel N. Bogorad and Cary B. Graham [Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1958], 65-75, at 66 [essay first published in 1953])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 