Freedman on The Act of Writing

From his stellar book:

To put it another way, the act of writing is the act of turning chaos into cosmos, of seeking to explain the hurly-burly of existence. Real life takes place in equal increments of sixty second to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, twenty-four hours to a day, none weighted any more or less than any other. A journalist dares to believe that he or she can selectively discern what is most significant from this ceaseless stream of activity and then explain it to the larger society. The basic forms of journalistic prose, if used judiciously, are the tools of doing so. They afford us venerable, proven ways of organizing material, and more importantly, they compel us to sharpen our thinking.

Samuel G. Freedman, Letters to a Young Journalist