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Writing Tools

50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"Writing is a craft you can learn," says Roy Peter Clark. "You need tools, not rules." In this essential guide, Clark distills decades of experience into fifty tools that writers of all kinds can use every day.You may be crafting a newspaper story or an admissions essay for college. You may be writing a technical report or drafting your first novel. You may be a student or a teacher, a poet or a critic, a columnist or a blogger. You may be preparing a PowerPoint presentation or penning a love letter. Whatever your task, you can become a more fluent and effective writer—a writer with a purpose, a plan, and a workbench full of tools. For example:

Tool 7: Fear not the long sentence. Take the reader on a journey of language and meaning.

Tool 28: Put odd and interesting things next to each other. Help the reader learn from contrast.

Tool 34: Write from different cinematic angles. Turn your notebook into a camera.

Tool 41: Turn procrastination into rehearsal. Plan and write it first in your head.

Clark works from the belief that every writer can grow—and should. Writing Tools shows the way.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 4, 2006
      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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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

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  • English

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