When Good People Write Bad Sentences

2013-08-27
When Good People Write Bad Sentences

PDF When Good People Write Bad Sentences Download

  • Author: Robert W. Harris
  • Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
  • ISBN: 1466852321
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 225

At last, help for writers who can admit they have a problem. Do you get a lift by dangling a participle? Has your punctuation ever caused difficulties at home or at work? Do you consider yourself just a "social misspeller?" These are just a few of the warning signs that you might have an addiction to bad writing. But fear not. This practical guide to eliminating bad writing habits will put you on the path to recovery. Filled with accessible advice and examples, this "powerful 12-step program" identifies the most common writing mistakes and offers simple ways to correct them. Here, you can learn to overcome wordiness, formality, incompleteness, and other problems that stand in the way of clear communication. And as you learn to eliminate ineffective sentences, you'll be "writing off" jargon, mixed metaphors, clichés, and more. The advice in this ingenious and useful book has helped Tom G., Martha D., and Cathy W.* write more clearly, confidently, and persuasively. It can do the same for you - whether you write for school, work, or pleasure. If you've tried other programs, only to fall back on bad habits, let Standard English be your guide. This book will show you how. Get ready to improve your writing skills - one sentence at a time. *their real names

Building Great Sentences

2013-06-25
Building Great Sentences

PDF Building Great Sentences Download

  • Author: Brooks Landon
  • Publisher: Penguin
  • ISBN: 1101614021
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 289

Based on the bestselling series from The Great Courses, Building Great Sentences celebrates the sheer joy of language—and will forever change the way you read and write. Great writing begins with the sentence. Whether it’s two words (“Jesus wept.”) or William Faulkner’s 1,287-word sentence in Absalom! Absalom!, sentences have the power to captivate, entertain, motivate, educate, and, most importantly, delight. Yet, the sentence-oriented approach to writing is too often overlooked in favor of bland economy. Building Great Sentences teaches you to write better sentences by luxuriating in the pleasures of language. Award-winning Professor Brooks Landon draws on examples from masters of long, elegant sentences—including Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and Samuel Johnson—to reveal the mechanics of how language works on thoughts and emotions, providing the tools to write powerful, more effective sentences.

Why I Write

2021-01-01
Why I Write

PDF Why I Write Download

  • Author: George Orwell
  • Publisher: Renard Press Ltd
  • ISBN: 1913724263
  • Category : Literary Collections
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 15

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

The Sense of Style

2015-09-22
The Sense of Style

PDF The Sense of Style Download

  • Author: Steven Pinker
  • Publisher: Penguin Books
  • ISBN: 0143127799
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 370

"Pinker has a lot of ideas and sometimes controversial opinions about writing and in this entertaining and instructive book he rethinks the usage guide for the 21st century. Don't blame the internet, he says, good writing has always been hard. It requires imagination, taking pleasure in reading, overcoming the difficult we all have in imaging what it's like to not know something we do know."--Publisher information.

Bad Behavior

2012-03-13
Bad Behavior

PDF Bad Behavior Download

  • Author: Mary Gaitskill
  • Publisher: Simon and Schuster
  • ISBN: 1451687079
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 227

National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill’s debut collection, Bad Behavior—powerful stories about dislocation, longing, and desire which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is searching for human connection. Now a classic, Bad Behavior made critical waves when it first published, heralding Gaitskill’s arrival on the literary scene and her establishment as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it “Pinteresque,” saying, “Ms. Gaitskill writes with such authority, such radar-perfect detail, that she is able to make even the most extreme situations seem real…her reportorial candor, uncompromised by sentimentality or voyeuristic charm…underscores the strength of her debut.”

Learn to Write Badly

2013-06-20
Learn to Write Badly

PDF Learn to Write Badly Download

  • Author: Michael Billig
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 1107244870
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages :

Modern academia is increasingly competitive yet the writing style of social scientists is routinely poor and continues to deteriorate. Are social science postgraduates being taught to write poorly? What conditions adversely affect the way they write? And which linguistic features contribute towards this bad writing? Michael Billig's witty and entertaining book analyses these questions in a quest to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong with the way social scientists write. Using examples from diverse fields such as linguistics, sociology and experimental social psychology, Billig shows how technical terminology is regularly less precise than simpler language. He demonstrates that there are linguistic problems with the noun-based terminology that social scientists habitually use - 'reification' or 'nominalization' rather than the corresponding verbs 'reify' or 'nominalize'. According to Billig, social scientists not only use their terminology to exaggerate and to conceal, but also to promote themselves and their work.

Red Orc's Rage

2012-03-19
Red Orc's Rage

PDF Red Orc's Rage Download

  • Author: Philip Jose Farmer
  • Publisher: Hachette UK
  • ISBN: 0575119640
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 282

Sent into the world of Tiers by a well-meaning doctor in the mental hospital where he is incarcerated, teenage troublemaker Jim Grimson finds himself in a world of fantasy and danger. Philip José Farmer returns to his towering World of Tiers, where immortal Lords fight bloody wars over a host of pocket universes.

The Story Grid

2015-05-02
The Story Grid

PDF The Story Grid Download

  • Author: Shawn Coyne
  • Publisher: Black Irish Entertainment LLC
  • ISBN: 1936891360
  • Category : Reference
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 459

WHAT IS THE STORY GRID? The Story Grid is a tool developed by editor Shawn Coyne to analyze stories and provide helpful editorial comments. It's like a CT Scan that takes a photo of the global story and tells the editor or writer what is working, what is not, and what must be done to make what works better and fix what's not. The Story Grid breaks down the component parts of stories to identify the problems. And finding the problems in a story is almost as difficult as the writing of the story itself (maybe even more difficult). The Story Grid is a tool with many applications: 1. It will tell a writer if a Story ?works? or ?doesn't work. 2. It pinpoints story problems but does not emotionally abuse the writer, revealing exactly where a Story (not the person creating the Story'the Story) has failed. 3. It will tell the writer the specific work necessary to fix that Story's problems. 4. It is a tool to re-envision and resuscitate a seemingly irredeemable pile of paper stuck in an attic drawer. 5. It is a tool that can inspire an original creation.

Several Short Sentences About Writing

2013-04-09
Several Short Sentences About Writing

PDF Several Short Sentences About Writing Download

  • Author: Verlyn Klinkenborg
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN: 0307279413
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 226

An indispensable and distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means for them to be writing, from widely admired writer and teacher Verlyn Klinkenborg. Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. In Several Short Sentences About Writing, he sets out to help us unlearn that “wisdom”—about genius, about creativity, about writer’s block, topic sentences, and outline—and understand that writing is just as much about thinking, noticing, and learning what it means to be involved in the act of writing. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. Instead it is a gathering of starting points in a journey toward lively, lucid, satisfying self-expression.

Reading Like a Writer

2012-04-01
Reading Like a Writer

PDF Reading Like a Writer Download

  • Author: Francine Prose
  • Publisher: Union Books
  • ISBN: 1908526149
  • Category : Biography & Autobiography
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 304

DIV In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and tricks of the masters to discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humour and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart – to take pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; to look to John le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue and to Flannery O’Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail; to be inspired by Emily Brontë’s structural nuance and Charles Dickens’s deceptively simple narrative techniques. Most importantly, Prose cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which all literature is crafted, and reminds us that good writing comes out of good reading. /div