The Phantom Professor is doing a nice series of posts on writing and style, with some cool exercises and such and so forth. I enjoyed this one on voice. Besides his thinking on voice itself, I appreciated his stuff about how long it takes to learn how to do anything well. 20 years to be an expert, he suggests. And this maybe makes me feel better that sometimes I can't figure out how to finish a paper. But it also makes me feel like some kind of permanent apprentice: "20 years if you're lucky, kiddo. Then maybe we'll give you that gold star for mastery. Or we'll maybe put you out to pasture like a racehorse who never won nuthin."