Today's An A List Apart article titled Writing is Thinking describes the struggle that many of us have with writing - whether it's an essay or content for our websites. Author Sally Kerrigan gets right to the point:

Writing is intimidating. There’s this expectation of artful precision, mercurial grammatical rules, and the weird angst that comes with writing for other people. You start with a tidy nugget of an idea, but as you try to string it into language, it feels more like you’re pulling out your own intestines.

Good writing is like a good conversation. And while chatting with someone can be fun, it often fails to get to the point and it can feel like rambling.

You want to be a friend to your readers here, in the sense that you want to respect their time and attention. Except in rare literary circles, there’s no good reason to make your readers work hard just to understand what you’re trying to say.

The entire article is worth the read as it provides an excellent way of approaching writing as an exercise that over time gets easier and better.