Style & Grammar
alone volume, On Writing is a handbook every fiction writer, whether novice or master, should keep within arm's reach. Like The Elements of Style, On Writing is concise and fundamental, authoritative and timeless--as was Eudora Welty herself.
Through this droll and spellbinding narrative, with its royal riffraff, brigands, nefarious beasts, cutthroat capitalists, cross-dressing cowboys, and come-hither heroines, and with the help of such eccentric language authorities as Startling Glower, Gordon clarifies the mysteries of language usage, focusing on the meanings of words that look alike or that aren't as interchangeable as we assume them to be. A thrilling companion lexicon of unusual words continues the tales and inspire anyone's vocabulary. All the while war, power, and celebrity cults are treated with satirical wit and insight.
With Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness, Karen Elizabeth Gordon once again lures her readers into the intricacies and pleasures of language through a brooding, hilarious fabric of fiction.
Throughout her career, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin has been at the vanguard of discussions about feminism and sexism, the state of poetry, and our place in the natural world. The Roots of Things gathers into one volume her best essays on the issues that have been closest to her throughout her storied career.
Divided into sections on Taking Root, Poets and Poetry, and Country Living, these pieces reveal Kumin honing her views within a variety of forms, including speeches, critical essays, and introductions of other writers' work. Whether she is recollecting scenes from her childhood, ruminating on the ups and downs of what she calls pobiz (for poetry business), describing the battles she's fought on behalf of women, or illuminating the lives of animals, Kumin offers insight that can only be born of long and closely observed experience.
A concise and accessible primer on the scientific writer's craft
The ability to write clearly is critical to any scientific career. The Scientist's Guide to Writing provides practical advice to help scientists become more effective writers so that their ideas have the greatest possible impact. Drawing on his own experience as a scientist, graduate adviser, and editor, Stephen Heard emphasizes that the goal of all scientific writing should be absolute clarity; that good writing takes deliberate practice; and that what many scientists need are not long lists of prescriptive rules but rather direct engagement with their behaviors and attitudes when they write. He combines advice on such topics as how to generate and maintain writing momentum with practical tips on structuring a scientific paper, revising a first draft, handling citations, responding to peer reviews, managing coauthorships, and more. In an accessible, informal tone, The Scientist's Guide to Writing explains essential techniques that students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career scientists need to write more clearly, efficiently, and easily."A witty and readable (and fetchingly illustrated and glossed) excursion through the history of handwriting." --The Wall Street Journal
Let a self-confessed "penmanship nut" take you on a tour of the strange and beautiful world of handwriting.
Since her Catholic school days learning the Palmer Method, Kitty Burns Florey has been in love with handwriting, and can't imagine a world where schools forego handwriting drills in favor of teaching something called keyboarding. In this "winsome mix of memoir and call to arms" (Chicago Tribune), Florey weaves together the evolution of writing implements and scripts, pen-collecting societies, the golden age of American penmanship, and the growth in popularity of handwriting analysis, and asks the question: Is writing by hand really no longer necessary in today's busy world? "Charmingly composed and handsomely presented," Script & Scribble traces the history of penmanship to the importance of writing by hand in an increasingly digital age (The Boston Globe).Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (+)--which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible--or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to chart the life and times of these enigmatic squiggles, both exotic (¶) and everyday (&).
From the Library of Alexandria to the halls of Bell Labs, figures as diverse as Charlemagne, Vladimir Nabokov, and George W. Bush cross paths with marks as obscure as the interrobang (?) and as divisive as the dash (--). Ancient Roman graffiti, Venetian trading shorthand, Cold War double agents, and Madison Avenue round out an ever more diverse set of episodes, characters, and artifacts.
Richly illustrated, ranging across time, typographies, and countries, Shady Characters will delight and entertain all who cherish the unpredictable and surprising in the writing life.
A fter a lifetime of writing and editing prose, Jacques Barzun has set down his view of the best ways to improve one's style. His discussions of diction, syntax, tone, meaning, composition, and revision guide the reader through the technique of making the written word clear and agreeable to read. Exercises, model passages both literary and casual, and hundreds of amusing examples of usage gone wrong show how to choose the right path to self-expression in forceful and distinctive words.
In its heyday, sentence diagramming was wildly popular in grammar schools across the country. Kitty Burns Florey learned the method in sixth grade from Sister Bernadette: It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked.
Florey explores the sentence-diagramming phenomenon, including its humble roots at the Brooklyn Polytechnic, its balloon diagram predecessor, and what diagrams of famous writers' sentences reveal about them. Along the way, Florey offers up her own commonsense approach to learning and using good grammar. Charming, fun, and instructive, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog will be treasured by all kinds of readers.
Completely revised and rewritten to address modern challenges and opportunities, this handbook is a short, deceptively simple guide to the craft of writing.
Le Guin lays out ten chapters that address the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Each chapter combines illustrative examples from the global canon with Le Guin's own witty commentary and an exercise that the writer can do solo or in a group. She also offers a comprehensive guide to working in writing groups, both actual and online.
Masterly and concise, Steering the Craft deserves a place on every writer's shelf.
writers' own commentaries on the craft and traditions of fiction. For in-depth, illustrated studies of particular writers, her "Casebooks" provide unparalleled opportunities for discussion and writing. For a shorter, more affordable option, the compact edition offers all the editorial features of the full edition with about half the stories and commentaries.
In this new edition, Hart has expanded the book's range to delve into podcasting and has incorporated new insights from recent research into storytelling and the brain. He has also added dozens of new examples that illustrate effective narrative nonfiction.
This edition of Storycraft is also paired with Wordcraft, a new incarnation of Hart's earlier book A Writer's Coach, now also available from Chicago.
From the work of the New Journalists in the 1960s, to the New Yorker essays of John McPhee, Susan Orlean, Atul Gawande, and a host of others, to blockbuster book-length narratives such as Mary Roach's Stiff or Erik Larson's Devil in the White City, narrative nonfiction has come into its own. Yet writers looking for guidance on reporting and writing true stories have had few places to turn for advice. Now in Storycraft, Jack Hart, a former managing editor of the Oregonian who guided several Pulitzer Prize-winning narratives to publication, delivers what will certainly become the definitive guide to the methods and mechanics of crafting narrative nonfiction.
Hart covers what writers in this genre need to know, from understanding story theory and structure, to mastering point of view and such basic elements as scene, action, and character, to drafting, revising, and editing work for publication. Revealing the stories behind the stories, Hart brings readers into the process of developing nonfiction narratives by sharing tips, anecdotes, and recommendations he forged during his decades-long career in journalism. From there, he expands the discussion to other well-known writers to show the broad range of texts, styles, genres, and media to which his advice applies. With examples that draw from magazine essays, book-length nonfiction narratives, documentaries, and radio programs, Storycraft will be an indispensable resource for years to come.The study of classical languages by earlier generations of English-speaking students was greatly facilitated by the study of English grammar in the schools, a tradition now out of favor but one that emphasized precisely the concepts, terms, and constructions needed for the study of Greek and Latin.
Recent classical language textbooks, while presuming little or no grammatical sophistication on the part of their students, often provide little more by way of remediation than definitions of grammatical terminology.
A Student Handbook of Greek and English Grammar offers a student-friendly comparative exposition of English and ancient Greek grammatical principles that will prove a valuable supplement to a wide range of beginning Greek textbooks as well as a handy reference for those continuing on to upper-level courses.
High school students, two-year college students, and university students all need to know how to write a well-reasoned, coherent research paper--and for decades Kate Turabian's Student's Guide to Writing College Papers has helped them to develop this critical skill. In the new fourth edition of Turabian's popular guide, the team behind Chicago's widely respected The Craft of Research has reconceived and renewed this classic for today's generation. Designed for less advanced writers than Turabian's Manual of Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition, Gregory G. Colomb and Joseph M. Williams here introduce students to the art of defining a topic, doing high-quality research with limited resources, and writing an engaging and solid college paper.
The Student's Guide is organized into three sections that lead students through the process of developing and revising a paper. Part 1, "Writing Your Paper," guides students through the research process with discussions of choosing and developing a topic, validating sources, planning arguments, writing drafts, avoiding plagiarism, and presenting evidence in tables and figures. Part 2, "Citing Sources," begins with a succinct introduction to why citation is important and includes sections on the three major styles students might encounter in their work--Chicago, MLA, and APA--all with full coverage of electronic source citation. Part 3, "Style," covers all matters of style important to writers of college papers, from punctuation to spelling to presenting titles, names, and numbers.
With the authority and clarity long associated with the name Turabian, the fourth edition of Student's Guide to Writing College Papers is both a solid introduction to the research process and a convenient handbook to the best practices of writing college papers. Classroom tested and filled with relevant examples and tips, this is a reference that students, and their teachers, will turn to again and again.
- A guide to the basics of writing concisely, including how to reduce the number of words in a phrase, substitute a single word for a phrase, and delete extraneous words and phrases.
- The "Dictionary of Concise Writing," which gives concise alternatives to thousands of wordy phrases. Language expert Robert Hartwell Fiske uses each wordy phrase in a sentence and then rewrites or deletes the phrase entirely to show how the sentence can be improved.
- The brand new "Guide to Obfuscation: A Reverse Dictionary," which helps writers build a more pithy vocabulary.
To the Point is the perfect reference book for anyone who wants to communicate more effectively through clear and beautiful writing.
- The Top Ten Books of All Time
- The Top Ten Books by Living Writers
- The Top Ten Books of the Twentieth Century
- The Top Ten Mysteries
- The Top Ten Comedies
Already sparking debate, The Top Ten will help readers answer the most pressing question of all: What should I read next?
Following the success of Quadrivium, Sciencia, and Designa in the acclaimed Wooden Books series, Trivium is a compendium of writings on the classical subjects at the heart of a liberal education, bringing the wisdom of the past into the twenty-first century.
The trivium refers to the three liberal arts considered in classical Greece to be the pillars of critical thought: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Following on the success of Quadrivium and Sciencia, Trivium gathers six Wooden Books titles together into a beautiful six-color package that presents ancient wisdom in an accessible way. Trivium will include the books Euphonics, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Poetic Meter and Form, and Ethics. Wooden Books was founded in 1999 by designer John Martineau near Hay-on-Wye. The aim was to produce a beautiful series of recycled books based on the classical philosophies, arts and sciences. Using the Beatrix Potter formula of text facing picture pages, and old-styles fonts, along with hand-drawn illustrations and 19th century engravings, the books are designed not to date. Small but stuffed with information. Eco friendly and educational. Big ideas in a tiny space. There are over 1,000,000 Wooden Books now in print worldwide and growing.