the well-fed writer

There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with the laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless. He who daily hears and reads well-framed sentences, will naturally more or less tend to use similar ones.

Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style, in Problems and Styles of Communication 166 (1945).