Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer - Softcover

Clark, Roy Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872899632 ISBN 13: 9780872899636

Publisher: CQ Press, 2008

Synopsis

As fun to read as it is hands-on practical, it can be enjoyed straight-through or used as a reference as students draft, revise, and edit. Spiral-bound, the College Edition lays flat as students work at the computer, and at $16.95 suggested retail (after bookstore mark-up), Writing Tools is considerably less expensive than traditional writing textbooks. With over 30,000 copies sold to the mass-market, the College Edition is the perfect book to accompany a more comprehensive textbook, or for classrooms that don′t use a traditional text at all.

About this title

About the Author

Roy Peter Clark is vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute. He has taught writing at every level―to school-children and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors―for more than 30 years, and has spoken about the craft of writing on The Oprah Winfrey Show, NPR, and Today; at conferences from Singapore to Brazil; and at news organizations from The New York Times to the Sowetan in South Africa. A writer who teaches, and a teacher who writes, he has authored and edited fourteen books about writing and journalism.

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: CQ Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0872899632
• ISBN 13: 9780872899636
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 245