Round 22, Hour 4
Oct. 21st, 2011 11:00 pmFor 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
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Date: 2011-10-23 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 12:19 pm (UTC)(According to Pitry, Giraffes are evil aliens bent on world domination anyway.)