Distillation. Monday's longish entry on journalism and racial struggle became a few words near the end of one sentence in this week's radio essay:

In dozens of clippings, a visitor can find area journalists at first unimpressed, then committed to getting the conscience-stirring story right.

Here's a hunch: most school assignments don't ask for and don't teach students how to distill something down like that. If so, then focused, compressed writing may elude them. A second hunch: writing every day on a blog brings a person back to a topic so many times that he or she will have time to distill ideas, if time, perhaps, is one of the main elements in the process. Restating the hunch: daily writing, even this newfangled blogging, is a powerful, fundamental cognitive process. [0 & P]