The Style section is like the Washington Post's version of Keith Olbermann: You either love it, or hate it. Erik Wemple chimed in on the Style section last week, prompting the Washington Post's Deneen Brown to write this internal note to her Style colleagues, obtained by FishbowlDC, to staffers:

Style is a great section. It is as great today as it was yesterday. The talent in Style is tremendous. Each writer has a distinctive voice. It is the collective of those voices that makes it a great. We all know that writing is subjective. There will be those who love us and those who think otherwise. In the meantime, I say we must continue to write, pushing our writing and styles to the very edge.

Nikki Giovanni once said: "You must do, say, write that which you belive to be true. What others think can be of no consequence."

And this is what Margaret Atwood writes about writing with confidence: "The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person and not even by yourself at some later date, otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."