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"The talented writer often uses rhetorically interesting, musical, or lyrical phrases that are briefer than the pedestrian way of saying "the same thing." The talented writer can explode, as with a verbal microscope, some fleeting sensation or action, tease out insights, and describe subsensations that we all recognize, even if we have rarely considered them before; that is, he or she describes them at greater length and tells more about them than other writers. In complex sentences with multiple clauses that relate in complex ways, the talented writer will organize those clauses in the chronological order in which the referents occur, despite the logical relation grammar imposes."

Last fall, Facebook released its first television advertisement. The ad was titled "The Things That Connect Us." It was intended, Mark Zuckerberg announced, with characteristic humility, "to express what our place is on this earth." It opened with a shot of a red chair levitating in a forest. Some music welled up. Then came the voiceover....