Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing

Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing PDF Author: Constance Hale
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393081168
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Helps aspiring writers understand the importance of using powerful verbs in their work through examples of brilliant writing and presents a linguistic history to demonstrate how language and writing has evolved over time.

Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing

Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing PDF Author: Constance Hale
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393081168
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Helps aspiring writers understand the importance of using powerful verbs in their work through examples of brilliant writing and presents a linguistic history to demonstrate how language and writing has evolved over time.

Vex Hex Smash Smooch

Vex Hex Smash Smooch PDF Author: Constance Hale
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393347052
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch is more than just a writing handbook; it’s a key to unlocking every writer’s innate creativity by offering countless paths to verbal expressiveness." —San Francisco Chronicle Great sentences pivot on great verbs. In Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, Constance Hale, best-selling author of Sin and Syntax, zeroes in on verbs that make bad writing sour and good writing sing. Each chapter in Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch features four sections: “Vex” tackles tough syntax, “Hex” debunks myths about verbs, “Smash” warns of bad writing habits, and “Smooch” showcases exemplary writing. A veteran journalist and writing teacher, Hale peppers her advice with pop-culture references and adapts her expertise for writers of every level. With examples ranging from the tangled clauses of Henry James and the piercing insight of Joan Didion to the punchy gerunds of the Coen brothers and the passive verbs of CEOs on trial, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch offers a reenergized take on the “little despot of the sentence.”

Sin and Syntax

Sin and Syntax PDF Author: Constance Hale
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 038534693X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A fully revised and updated edition with writing prompts and challenges in every chapter Today’s writers need more spunk than Strunk: whether it's the Great American e-mail, Madison Avenue advertising, or Grammy Award-winning rap lyrics, memorable writing must jump off the page. Copy veteran Constance Hale is on a mission to make creative communication, both the lyrical and the unlawful, an option for everyone. With its crisp, witty tone, Sin and Syntax covers grammar’s ground rules while revealing countless unconventional syntax secrets (such as how to use—Gasp!—interjections or when to pepper your prose with slang) that make for sinfully good writing. Discover how to: *Distinguish between words that are “pearls” and words that are “potatoes” * Avoid “couch potato thinking” and “commitment phobia” when choosing verbs * Use literary devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, and metaphor (and understand what you're doing) Everyone needs to know how to write stylish prose—students, professionals, and seasoned writers alike. Whether you’re writing to sell, shock, or just sing, Sin and Syntax—now celebrating 20 years in print—is the guide you need to improve your command of the English language.

Sin and Syntax

Sin and Syntax PDF Author: Constance Hale
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
ISBN: 0767908929
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Today’s writers need more spunk than Strunk: whether it's the Great American e-mail, Madison Avenue advertising, or Grammy Award-winning rap lyrics, memorable writing must jump off the page. Copy veteran Constance Hale is on a mission to make creative communication, both the lyrical and the unlawful, an option for everyone. With its crisp, witty tone, Sin and Syntax covers grammar’s ground rules while revealing countless unconventional syntax secrets (such as how to use—Gasp!—interjections or when to pepper your prose with slang) that make for sinfully good writing. Discover how to: *Distinguish between words that are “pearls” and words that are “potatoes” * Avoid “couch potato thinking” and “commitment phobia” when choosing verbs * Use literary devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, and metaphor (and understand what you're doing) Everyone needs to know how to write stylish prose—students, professionals, and seasoned writers alike. Whether you’re writing to sell, shock, or just sing, Sin and Syntax is the guide you need to improve your command of the English language.

The Art of X-Ray Reading

The Art of X-Ray Reading PDF Author: Roy Peter Clark
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316282162
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Roy Peter Clark, one of America's most influential writing teachers, offers writing lessons we can draw from 25 great texts. Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made. In The Art of X-Ray Reading, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through some of the most exquisite and masterful literary works of all time, from The Great Gatsby to Lolita to The Bluest Eye, and many more. Along the way, he shows you how to mine these masterpieces for invaluable writing strategies that you can add to your arsenal and apply in your own writing. Once you've experienced X-ray reading, your writing will never be the same again.

Word Magic for Writers

Word Magic for Writers PDF Author: Cindy Rogers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781889715247
Category : Authorship
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
WORD MAGIC FOR WRITERS is a fascinating book that clearly shows you how to boost the success potential of your writing project, whether an article, speech, story, book, play, or advertising, by elevating and energizing--charging up--the language in which it is written. From this one source, you'll discover how to craft beginnings that hook the reader, middles that compel him or her to stay on the hook, dialogue and descriptions that sizzle and enchant, and endings that leave the reader eager to read more of your work.

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks PDF Author: Keith Houston
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393064425
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Revealing the secret history of punctuation, this tour of two thousand years of the written word, from ancient Greece to the Internet, explores the parallel histories of language and typography throughout the world and across time.

Wired Style

Wired Style PDF Author: Constance Hale
Publisher: Wired Books
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Wired magazine's top editors have weighed thousands of new terms, phrases, idioms, and usages of the language since the advent of the global village. Elements of Style is no longer sufficient as a guide to English usage--Wired America needs Wired Style.

Iwalani's Tree

Iwalani's Tree PDF Author: Constance Hale
Publisher: Beachhouse Pub.
ISBN: 9781933067803
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
On the North Shore of O'ahu, a girl named 'Iwalani lives with her family not far from Ka'ena Point, at the island's westernmost tip. 'Iwalani likes to wander down the beach to a place where an ironwood tree stands as a windbreakjust on the spot where the land becomes sand. The tree is 'Iwalani's playground, jungle gym, secret friend, and wise elder, all in one. From the ironwood she learns about the cycles of nature, the promise of imaginative freedom, and the power of dreams. Written as a gentle poem, with soft rhythms and playful language, 'Iwalani's Tree is the perfect bedtime book. Like a soft wind, it will lull your child to sleep.

Editors Talk about Editing

Editors Talk about Editing PDF Author: Susan L. Greenberg
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781433120046
Category : Book editors
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The work of «editing» is by and large something that happens behind the scenes, noticed only when it is done badly, or not done at all. There is not much information about what editors do. The result is that editing is not often talked about in its own right - not even by the people who do it. This collection of interviews attempts to fill some of the gaps. The author, a former editor herself, interviews practitioners at the top of their game - from newspapers, magazines, broadcast news, book publishing, scholarly editing, academic publishing and digital curation. The interviewees think out loud about creativity and human judgment; what they have in common and what makes them different; how editing skills and culture can be shared; why editing continues to fascinate; and why any of this might matter.