Round 22, Hour 4

[lolmac]

For an outstanding book on writing:  Ursula LeGuin, Steering the Craft.

For a splendid book on language:  Arthur Plotnik's Spunk and Bite, A Writer's Guide to Punchier, More Engaging Language & Style.

For a fine guide to punctuation:  Karen Gordon's The Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed.

"The rhythms of prose . . . are usually hidden or obscure, not obvious.  They may be long and large, involving the whole shape of a story, the whole course of events of a novel: so large they're hard to see, like the shapes of the mountains when you're driving on a mountain road.  But the mountains are there." -- Steering the Craft, p. 54

"Teachers trying to get school kids to write clearly, and journalists with their weird rules of writing, have filled a lot of heads with the notion that the only good sentence is a short sentence.  This is true for convicted criminals." -- ibid., p. 40