Putting: Science or Art?

     The saying goes, "Drive for show and putt for dough."  Cliche, but true.  When the putter is working, the wins pile up.  When it's not, the frustration of one of those losing streak things is apt to occur.  Nothing is as important as the ability to drain, and often.  It doesn't much matter what you do on the rest of a hole, if you miss the putt, you aren't going to be racking up the birdies.
     The most important aspect of putting is getting the ball close to the hole.  If you slide by the cup with a miss of an inch, but, you also go ten feet past, you are going to be a bogey machine.  Find yourself some putting charts and get your distances down.  Once you are consistently hitting to within a foot or two, then you can work on actually putting it in the hole.  I've heard that the charts at OttawaGolf are good, although I don't use that particular flavour.  They are available from several sources.  Spend a bit of time looking through ls pages and find some that you are comfortable with.
     Aimpoint is the next thing to work on.  Once again, personal preference has a lot to do with how you aim.  Try and develop a style where you use the same basic aiming system all the time and stick with it.  Don't just eyeball the break and put the aiming stick wherever looks right.  When you use the stick you get numbers, use them.  I aim using the same distance as the hole is so that I get a consistent feel to my putts.  I count the break marks between the ball and the hole to get a basic break.  Then, I adjust that number depending on elevation and green conditions.  A downhill putt will break more than uphill.  Also a more severe break will break more than indicated by a count because the putt breaks harder as it dies.   As far as conditions go, the faster the green the more the break.  If I'm playing on fst greens, I'll count the marks and then add a minimum of 50%.  When I say count the marks, what I mean is that I will look at each gridline on the way to the hole and say, that one is one inch of break, that one is 4 inches.....etc. until I arrive at a total.  With double breakers, I subtract and get a net result.  That's a very simplistic look at it, but with practise, consistency can be developed.
     This has been a lot of yapping with little real information.   Because I'm of the opinion that putting is more of an art.  Surely, there is the numbers to consider, but, so much of it is feel.  And practise, lots of practise.