I had a problem. Before I tell you about this problem, be warned — you will get emotional if you keep reading. Your heart will break for me. There will be weeping, so much weeping. You will be tempted to start a GoFundMe page to help ease my burden.

OK, here it is. Ready? Grab a tissue.

I have so many sneakers that I can’t remember all the pairs I own. Tragic, but true. The Red Cross has already declared this an international emergency.

Alright, alright — this is not a real problem. Well, maybe it’s the first-worldliest of first-world…

Roger opened the Medium app on his phone and looked for something interesting to read. He scrolled past articles about how to be more creative. He scrolled past articles about how to be a mega-successful entrepreneur. He scrolled past articles about how to write way more gooder.

He was about to bounce over to Twitter when a headline caught his eye.

Forget Angular. Forget React. Introducing Tupress, the ultimate JavaScript framework.

Hmm, maybe it’s time to finally learn a framework, Roger thought. He had been dabbling in JavaScript for a few months. Why not see what all the framework fuss…

It was far past midnight. My wife and kids had long gone to bed. But sleep was not an option for me. I had to figure it out. So I tweaked the code again, for the googolth time, and hit run.

Hmm, looks promising.

If I click here, the program should call the “compute next move” function. Yes. And if I click here, that function should call itself. Good. Now, if I click here, I should get…not that.

Argh.

More tweaks. More errors. More hours tick by.

Learning programming is hard, I thought. My next thought?

Yes, and that’s why…

I know sentences. In my decade as a print journalist, I’ve written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications. I’ve dished out more sentences than Judge Judy. But I didn’t study writing or journalism, at least not formally.

My degree is in electrical engineering. I learned to write by studying, and imitating, the sentences of professional writers. And writers are at their best, generally, in their first and last sentences.

“The most important sentence in any article is the first one.

You should give as much thought to choosing your last sentence as you did your first.”

— On Writing…