Adios, Strunk and White: A Handbook for the New Academic Essay 4th ed.

Enjoy the writing tools strong writers know about but never talk about. Adios is for processional writers, college students, professors, K-12 teachers, and self-taught writers. Learn style for business, academic, scientific, and creative writing through concepts that appeal to our rhythmic, spatial, and playful sensibilities. Expand writing beyond the five-paragraph, academic word-box. Develop a distinct voice required by major university application forms and journal editors. Merge style with critical thinking, logic, and research. Everything is explained with verve. The Hoffmans practice what they preach.

Nothing has affected me as a professor of English more than attending the School of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley when I was eighteen. Several years later (after switching to English and art at UCLA, and then as a PhD candidate in English at the University of Southern California) just finishing my first year as an instructor at Orange Coast College, I had a nightmare: a career stretching years ahead made miserable not so much by thought-sloppy student essays but by the boredom of reading A papers, propped up by grammatical correctness and safe English-teacher formulas such as the five-paragraph essay. I remember asking what those papers had to do with Joan Didion s incisive voice. Where were Norman-Maileresque fire flashes? This realization started an unimaginable process. I designed new ways of thinking about writing into a book called Writeful. Four years after Writeful, I met Glynis who also believed style was more than just attitude; it shaped content. When she opened Writeful, she told me, she saw a truth she always knew, that form followed function. As Glynis finished degrees in English at California State University, Fullerton, and entered the teaching profession at several campuses, she visited my writing courses, dragging me outside during breaks to explain how my designs needed renovations. When she started teaching at Orange Coast College, she revised many of the designs and finally began to Bauhaus some of her own. Thirteen years after I had written Writeful, Glynis and I rewrote Writeful into Adios, Strunk and White. And now, over ten years later, we are still discovering ways to improve Adios. Gary Hoffman