Quality in Writing

What is good writing? What is it that makes writing easy to read, lucid, even luminous? It's not just vocabulary and grammar.

Good writing flows; we get caught up in it. We forget about mere words and sentences and lose ourselves in the intoxication of meaning. But if we do happen to look more closely, we see that this flow is created by the care of all the little parts: the word order, the insertion of a clause to adjust the timing of the sentence, the way topics are introduced and left off and woven back in. And again, it is just this care of the parts that frees us from being distracted by them, and allows us to be caught up in the whole.