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The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material.

In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates.

Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.

After a 30-year career as a writer, instructor, and editor, Mark Rennella has crafted a battle-tested method to help students and young professionals who want to improve their writing: the One-Idea Rule, anchored on the assertion that every component of a successful piece of writing should express only one idea.

With The One-Idea Rule, writers embarking on their adult lives and professional journeys will have a reliable methodology they can easily remember and count on for all of their writing tasks, as well as increased confidence about the cogency of their writing and its potential for impact in the public sphere.

Most advice about writing looks like a long laundry list of dos and don’ts. For those already accomplished as writers, these lists can be a helpful addition to an already-developed communication style. But for teens starting college and young professionals entering the workforce, it can be challenging to wield such complex advice to tackle increasingly demanding writing assignments.

The One-Idea Rule is a writing primer aligned and empathetic with any young writer’s needs.