How to Take the Mystique out of Published Writing

Here's a trick to inspire you in writing: take some piece of writing that
looks impressive, such as a Nature article, use the text select tool
(assuming it's a pdf) and copy it into a Word document. Format it Times
New Roman double-spaced, 12 point. Suddenly your own prose doesn't sound
so far away from what the published professionals are writing. And it's
a good way to start the work of dissecting and reverse engineering a style
of article published in a specific publication so you can get in there
yourself.

I first figured this out when I started writing articles for the arts
section of the student newspaper. I would email them in, and then I'd be
startled to see how authoritative they looked when beautifully set out in
Quark XPress and printed on newsprint. I remember shortly thereafter
reading a Globe and Mail arts article, I believe it was a review of Stuart
Little 2, and mentally transposing it back into an email from its neat 1
1/2 inch column. It was some badly written, weak-ass crap! I was greatly
encouraged.