The Golden Rule of writing

I read an article recently about a man who drives an old car that is rusty, dented, dirty and is even missing a door. The owner didn't care how it looked. It got him around town.
In the first sentence, the author referred to "the eccentric-looking car" - and I thought, wait a minute. Can a car be eccentric-looking? I went to my old friend on the bookshelf, Noah Webster, and confirmed that eccentric means "peculiar" or "deviating from the norm" and refers to a person or conduct.
Cars are a lot of things - but they're not eccentric. So the writer, whose job is to entice me, stopped me in my tracks in his first sentence.
This brings us to what writer Eric Cummings calls "the golden rule of writing: Intend every word you write. He recalls an incident in his college Creative Writing class in which he was asked to read his short story. He began, "Light barely flooded into the room." His professor stopped him and asked him what he meant. Was it possible for anything to "barely flood?" Cummings changed it to "light trickled into the room."
So the golden rule is "intend every word you write." A century ago, William Strunk put it another way in his masterpiece, "The Elements of Style," saying "make every word tell."