Reading and writing as craft

I've been reading Prof, Christopher Meredith's inaugural professorial lecture, "Miller's Answer: making, saying and the impulse to write" which has some fascinating things to say about the difference between spoken and written language and the simultaneous perception of language as something "ordinary", with which everyone is born, and "special",crafted in a way that is the reverse of instinctive. He has a lovely anecdote about the painter Degas, one day saying to the poet Mallarmé, "I've had...