Paine's immensely popular and influential pamphlet Common Sense helped inspire the American colonists. Of Paine John Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain." The Rights of Man" was in part a defense of the French Revolution.
"Part of Paine's work was to render complex ideas intelligible to average readers of the day, with clear, concise writing unlike the formal, learned style favored by many of Paine's contemporaries." (Wikipedia.)

AMONG the manuscript books of George Washington, preserved in the State Archives at Washington City, the earliest bears the date, written in it by himself, 1745. Washington was born February 11, 1731, so that while writing in this book he was either near the close of his fourteenth, or in his fifteenth, year. It is entitled "Forms of Writing," has thirty folio pages, and the contents, all in his boyish handwriting, are sufficiently curious. Amid copied forms of exchange, bonds, receipts, sales, and similar exercises, an occasional pen-and-ink face occurs; and there are poetic selections,...