2. Read it out loud. Written and spoken English are almost different languages but there is still no better way of finding where you have gone wrong than speaking your lines. With luck, you will spot the gaffes and garbles in your text. You will also hear the false notes in your language.

Not many of the “rules” of grammar survive this test. I have given up using “whom”, for example, after hearing how prissy and archaic it sounds. English is evolving as it always does, and the “who/whom” distinction has the stench of death about it. The “rules” against ending sentences with a preposition or starting them with an “And” or “But” feel equally snobbish and dated. As do many others. A piece of writing may be perfectly grammatical. But if your words have an ugly sound or a confused meaning, throw them out and the rules of grammar with them.

3. Ignore the readers. I was taught to think about who you are writing for. And, of course, there are many times where you still should. A physicist writing on quantum   theory for other physicists is not guilty of jargon-mongering if he or she uses language only one person in 100,000 understands. They are conducting a specialised debate among specialists, who do not need to have physics made simple.

Increasingly, however, you have no idea who you are writing for, whether on news sites or on Twitter. Before the web, you could assume that a conservative magazine had a conservative readership. However hard you tried, that knowledge bent your writing.

You can make no assumptions now. It is more likely than not that the readers have come to you through a Twitter or Facebook link. They have not bought a newspaper or magazine. They are fleeting visitors to a website without the faintest idea of its traditions, politics and culture. They arrive without preconceptions, and you can have no preconceptions about them.

This is a loss. Writers can no longer talk candidly to readers as allies in a common cause. But the benefits are enormous. The anonymity of the readership frees you to write without prejudice. You are talking to strangers, and must persuade them to agree with you or at least accept you have a point. Anonymity forces you to write clearly. You cannot resort to in-jokes or exploit shared biases.
In other words you must worry like hell about what you write and how you write but not give a damn about who reads you. Surprisingly, your indifference makes you a better writer.

4. Cut, cut and cut again. There are a good dozen writers’ sayings urging you to slash like a deranged axeman: “Kill your darlings”; “You can’t sub what’s not there”; “The first draft doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be finished”; “Prose is like hair — it shines with combing”; and my favourite: “In the beginning was the Word, and the subs cut it.”

Get something down. Don’t worry if it’s any good. Then rewrite it, cut it, hold it upside down and shake it until every fusty convention and meandering aside has fallen on the ground.

Then, and only then, can you produce prose that will just about do.