Finally, the fourth principal, humanity. This principal 1)underlies all the others and it's 2)crucial. So please be natural, be yourself. Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. If you're not the kind of person who says "indeed" or "moreover," please don't say it in writing. Most people trying to write, sit down to commit an act of literature. And the person who 3)emerges on paper is very much different from the person who sat down to write.
It's amazing how often an editor can find the perfect lead in an article by simply throwing away the first two or three paragraphs or the first two or three pages and starting the article where the writer finally stops building this elaborate 4)edifice, the lead, the sacred lead, and begins to relax and sound like himself or herself. What I'm always looking for as an editor is a sentence that says something like, "I'll never forget the day when I..." and I'll think ah ha! There's a person. Up to that point no person has been visible because the writer has been making this self conscious construction, the lead, full of 5)vague generalizations, that has no life of its own.
Most writers are frozen by their vision of the audience. All those people out there who will be reading what you write. But only one person will be reading your article at any one time and the writers we like the most are men and women we can identify with as people. What any writer has to sell, what you have to sell is not what you're writing about, it's who you are. I often find myself reading with interest about some subject I could have 6)sworn didn't interest me, maybe some odd scientific 7)quest. Lewis Thomas, a cell biologist writes 8)eloquently on subjects like, well, ants. Ants are very low on any list of subjects I think I want to read about, but I'll read anything Lewis Thomas writes about ants. It's not the ant that interests me. it's Lewis Thomas's interest in the ant, what got him interested, what keeps him going and you can generate the same kind of interest. Your material is yourself, so trust it and use it.