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Introduction 5 writing as a practical skill. There are historical reasons for this. Our current ideas about education were developed in the 20th century when the major- ity of our country’s population became literate. We embraced new theories of learning and ignored the fact that, for most of history, societies depended on the oral transmission of knowledge. If an individual needed to remember information, he or she used a mnemonic technique now referred to as the memory palace. The memory palace consisted of a series of mental prompts that allowed an individual to store and retrieve large amounts of informa- tion. There are many pieces of magnificent literature that were passed down to us in this fashion, such as Homer’s Iliad and the Sanskrit Vedas. In the late 19th and early 20th century, written communication gradu- ally became the dominant medium through which knowledge was shared and preserved. Oral communication was devalued, as was the ability to memorize and store information. This is unfortunate, because auditory learning is always present in our consciousness and can be tapped into at any time. A central thesis of this book is that you can use multiple meth- ods to help you write better and more professionally. If you are having trouble putting words down on paper, tapping into your auditory memory may be a good strategy. It is an often-overlooked technique, probably because hearing is one of those senses—like smell—that we no longer rely on much. Sight, the dominant sense of perception used for reading, is much more important in modern life. TAP INTO YOUR AUDITORY MEMORY An example of an auditory learner is my former student Peter. He was unable to write a paragraph, let alone a sentence that was intelligible to the reader. Misdiagnosed as having a learning disability, Peter was placed in special education classes in elementary school. It was not until junior high, after more testing, that he was identified as a having a near genius IQ. By the time he got to college, he had the reputation of being a very bright but unfocused student who was always late with his assignments—a C student at best. But because he was obviously so intelligent and so charming, he managed to get himself into the honors program at our university. I was assigned to be the faculty advisor for his senior thesis—a graduation requirement for the program. Peter realized he had a problem with time management, and we decided that he needed to use the whole year to work on his thesis, as opposed to the usual semester. He began his research by reading voraciously until he