In a recent article about leadership, wunderkind, pizza lover, and all around good guy Shane Snow included this parenthetical remark:

(As a good editor of mine once told me, great writing is about research, writing, and thinking. Most people forget to spend a third of their time on the latter.)

And, just like that, he utterly challenged the way I teach writing (something I’ve been doing for almost two decades).  It’s that last “third of the time” — thinking — that usually gets away from us.