Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer - Hardcover

Clark, Roy Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316014982 ISBN 13: 9780316014984

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2006

Synopsis

A special 10th anniversary edition of Roy Peter Clark's bestselling guide to writing, featuring five bonus tools.

Ten years ago, Roy Peter Clark, America's most influential writing teacher, whittled down almost thirty years of experience in journalism, writing, and teaching into a series of fifty short essays on different aspects of writing. In the past decade, Writing Tools has become a classic guidebook for novices and experts alike and remains one of the best loved books on writing available.

Organized into four sections, "Nuts and Bolts," "Special Effects," "Blueprints for Stories," and "Useful Habits," Writing Tools is infused with more than 200 examples from journalism and literature. This new edition includes five brand new, never-before-shared tools.

Accessible, entertaining, inspiring, and above all, useful for every type of writer, from high school student to novelist, Writing Tools is essential reading.

About this title

About the Author

Roy Peter Clark, a writer who teaches and a teacher who writes, is vice president and senior scholar of the Poynter Institute, one of the most prestigious schools for journalists in the world. He has written or edited 14 books about writing and journalism. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

From Publishers Weekly

Covering the writing waterfront-from basics on verb tense to the value of forming a "support group"-Poynter Institute vice president Clark offers tips, tricks and techniques for anyone putting fingers to keyboard. The best assets in Clark's book are in the "workshop" sections that conclude each chapter and list strategies for incorporating the material covered in each lesson (minimize adverbs, use active verbs, read your work aloud). Though some suggestions are classroom campy ("Listen to song lyrics to hear how the language moves on the ladder of abstraction" and "With some friends, take a big piece of chart paper and with colored markers draw a diagram of your writing process"), Clark's blend of instruction and exercise will prove especially useful for teachers. One exercise, for instance, suggests reading the newspaper and marking the location of subjects and verbs. Another provides a close reading of a passage from The Postman Always Rings Twice to look at the ways word placement and sentence structure can add punch to prose. Clark doesn't intend his guide to be a replacement for classic style guides like Elements of Style, but as a companion volume, it does the trick.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0316014982
• ISBN 13: 9780316014984
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272