As a middle school teacher, Jeff Anderson also discovered that his students were not grasping the basics, and that it was preventing them from reaching their potential as writers. Jeff readily admits, “I am not a grammarian, nor am I punctilious about anything,” so he began researching and testing the ideas of scores of grammar experts in his classroom, gradually finding successful ways of integrating grammar instruction into writer's workshop.Mechanically Inclined is the culmination of years of experimentation that merges the best of writer's workshop elements with relevant theory about how and why skills should be taught. It connects theory about using grammar in context with practical instructional strategies, explains why kids often don't understand or apply grammar and mechanics correctly, focuses on attending to the “high payoff,” or most common errors in student writing, and shows how to carefully construct a workshop environment that can best support grammar and mechanics concepts. Jeff emphasizes four key elements in his teaching:short daily instruction in grammar and mechanics within writer's workshop;using high-quality mentor texts to teach grammar and mechanics in context;visual scaffolds, including wall charts, and visual cues that can be pasted into writer's notebooks;regular, short routines, like “express-lane edits,” that help students spot and correct errors automatically.Comprising an overview of the research-based context for grammar instruction, a series of over thirty detailed lessons, and an appendix of helpful forms and instructional tools, Mechanically Inclined is a boon to teachers regardless of their level of grammar-phobia. It shifts the negative, rule-plagued emphasis of much grammar instruction into one which celebrates the power and beauty these tools have in shaping all forms of writing.

    Finally a script format guide that is accurate, complete, authoritative and easy to use, written by Hollywood's foremost authority on industry standard script formats.

    It is here that students brainstorm topics, play with leads and endings, tweak a new revision strategy, or test out a genre for the first time.In Notebook Know-How, Aimee Buckner provides the tools teachers need to make writers' notebooks an integral part of their writing programs. She also addresses many of the questions teachers ask when they start using notebooks with their students, including:How do I launch the notebook?What mini-lessons can be used throughout the year to help students become more skilled in keeping notebooks?How do I help students who are stuck in writing ruts with notebooks?How do I help students use their learning from notebooks for other writing?How do I organize notebooks so that the design is flexible, yet still allows students to access information easily?How can writers' notebooks help students become better readers? How do I assess notebooks?This compact guide is packed with lessons, tips, and samples of student writing to help teachers make the most of writers' notebooks, without sacrificing time needed for the rest of the literacy curriculum. In fact, Notebook Know-How shows how smart and focused use of writers' notebooks enhances and deepens literacy learning in both reading and writing for students in grades 3–8.

    Why is that? What happens to creativity and individuality as we pass through the educational system?Walking on Water is a startling and provocative look at teaching, writing, creativity, and life by a writer increasingly recognized for his passionate and articulate critique of modern civilization. This time Derrick Jensen brings us into his classroom--whether college or maximum security prison--where he teaches writing. He reveals how schools perpetuate the great illusion that happiness lies outside of ourselves and that learning to please and submit to those in power makes us into lifelong clock-watchers. As a writing teacher Jensen guides his students out of the confines of traditional education to find their own voices, freedom, and creativity.Jensen's great gift as a teacher and writer is to bring us fully alive at the same moment he is making us confront our losses and count our defeats. It is at the center of Walking on Water, a book that is not only a hard-hitting and sometimes scathing critique of our current educational system and not only a hands-on method for learning how to write, but, like Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, a lesson on how to connect to the core of our creative selves, to the miracle of waking up and arriving breathless (but with dry feet) on the far shore.

    Includes interviews with hundreds of publishing insiders and authors, including Seth Godin, Neil Gaiman, Amy Bloom, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Lopate, plus agents, editors, and booksellers; sidebars featuring real-life publishing success stories; sample proposals, query letters, and an entirely updated resources and publishers directory.

    Based on his acclaimed classes at UCLA Extension, Writing for Emotional Impact goes beyond the basics and argues that Hollywood is in the emotion-delivery business, selling emotional experiences packaged in movies and TV shows. Iglesias not only encourages you to deliver emtional impact on as many pages as possible, he shows you how, offering hundreds of dramatic techniques to take your writing to the professional level.

    In the pages of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Kooser brings those decades of experience to bear. Here are tools and insights, the instructions (and warnings against instructions) that poets—aspiring or practicing—can use to hone their craft, perhaps into art. Using examples from his own rich literary oeuvre and from the work of a number of successful contemporary poets, the author schools us in the critical relationship between poet and reader, which is fundamental to what Kooser believes is poetry’s ultimate purpose: to reach other people and touch their hearts. Much more than a guidebook to writing and revising poems, this manual has all the comforts and merits of a long and enlightening conversation with a wise and patient old friend—a friend who is willing to share everything he’s learned about the art he’s spent a lifetime learning to execute so well.

    From Sherwood Anderson to Virginia Woolf, this anthology encompasses a rich global and historical mix of the very best works of short fiction and presents them in a way students will find accessible, engaging, and relevant. The book's unique integration of biographical and critical background gives students a more intimate understanding of the works and their authors.Contents:Part I. Introduction. The art of the short story.-- Part II. Stories [A-J]. Chinua Achebe: Dead men's path ; Author's perspective, Achebe: modern Africa as the crossroads of culture -- Sherwood Anderson: Hands ; Author's perspective, Anderson: Words not plot give form to a short story -- Margaret Atwood: Happy endings ; Author's perspective, Atwood: On the Canadian identity -- James Baldwin: Sonny's blues ; Author's perspective, Baldwin: Race and the African-American writer -- Jorge Luis Borges: The garden of forking paths ; Author's perspective, Borges: Literature as experience -- Albert Camus: The guest ; Author's perspective, Camus: Revolution and repression in Algeria -- Raymond Carver: Cathedral ; A small, good thing ; Author's perspective, Carver: Commonplace but precise language -- Willa Cather: Paul's case ; Author's perspective, Cather: Art as the process of simplification -- John Cheever: The swimmer ; Author's perspective, Cheever: Why I write short stories -- Anton Chekhov: The lady with the pet dog ; Misery ; Author's perspective, Chekhov: Natural description and "The center of gravity" -- Kate Chopin: The storm ; The story of an hour ; Author's perspective, Chopin: My writing method -- Sandra Cisneros: Barbie-Q ; Author's perspective, Cisneros: Bilingual style -- Joseph Conrad: The secret sharer ; Author's perspective, Conrad: The condition of art -- Stephen Crane: The open boat ; Author's perspective, Crane: The sinking of the Commodore -- Ralph Ellison: A party down at the square ; Author's perspective, Ellison: Race and fiction -- William Faulkner: Barn burning ; A rose for Emily ; Author's perspective, Faulkner: The human heart in conflict with itself -- F. Scott Fitzgerald: Babylon revisited ; Author's perspective, Fitzgerald: On his own literary aims -- Gustave Flaubert: A simple heart ; Author's perspective, Flaubert: The labor of style -- Gabriel García Marquez: A very old man with enormous wings ; Author's perspective, García Marquez: My beginnings as a writer -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The yellow wallpaper ; Author's perspective, Gilman: Why I wrote "The yellow wallpaper" -- Nikolai Gogol: The overcoat ; Author's perspective, Gogol: On realism -- Nadine Gordimer: A company of laughing faces ; Author's perspective, Gordimer: How the short story differs from the novel -- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown ; The birthmark ; Author's perspective, Hawthorne: On the public failure of his early stories -- Ernest Hemingway: A clean, well-lighted place ; Author's perspective, Hemingway: One true sentence -- Zora Neale Hurston: Sweat ; Author's perspective, Hurston: Eatonville when you look at it -- Shirley Jackson: The lottery ; Author's perspective, Jackson: The public reception of "The lottery" -- Henry James: The real thing ; Author's perspective, James: The mirror of a consciousness -- Ha Jin: Saboteur ; Author's perspective, Jin: Deciding to write in English -- James Joyce : Araby ; The dead ; Author's perspective, Joyce: Epiphanies. Contents: Part II[ Cont.]. Stories [K-W]. Franz Kafka: Before the law ; The metamorphosis ; Author's perspective, Kafka: Discussing The metamorphosis -- D.H. Lawrence: Odour of Chrysanthemums ; The rocking-horse winner ; Author's perspective, Lawrence: The novel is the bright book of life -- Ursula K. Le Guin: the ones who walk away from Omelas ; Author's perspective, Le Guin: On "The ones who walk away from Omelas" -- Doris Lessing: A woman on a roof ; Author's perspective, Lessing: My beginnings as a writer -- Jack London: To build a fire ; Author's perspective, London: Defending the factuality of "To build a fire" -- Katherine Mansfield: Miss Brill ; The garden-party ; Author's perspective, Mansfield: On "The garden-party" -- Bobbie Ann Mason: Shiloh ; Author's perspective, Mason: Minimalist fiction -- Guy de Maupassant: The necklace ; Author's perspective, Maupassant: The realist method -- Herman Melville: Bartleby, the scrivener : a story of Wall-Street ; Author's perspective, Melville: American literature -- Yukio Mishima: Patriotism ; Author's perspective, Mishima: Physical courage and death -- Alice Munro: How I met my husband ; Author's perspective, Munro: How I write short stories -- Joyce Carol Oates: where are you going, where have you been? ; Author's perspective, Oates: Productivity and the critics -- Flannery O'Connor: A good man is hard to find ; Revelation ; Author's perspective, O'Connor: The element of suspense in "A good man is hard to find" -- Edgar Allan Poe: The fall of the House of Usher ; The Tell-tale heart ; Author's perspective, Poe: The tale and its effect -- Katherine Anne Porter: Flowering Judas ; Author's perspective, Porter: Writing "Flowering Judas" -- Leslie Marmon Silko: The man to send rain clouds ; Author's perspective, Silko: the basis of "The man to send rain clouds" -- Isaac Bashevis singer: Gimpel the Fool ; Author's perspective, Singer: The character of Gimpel -- Leo Tolstoy: The death of Ivan Ilych ; Author's perspective, Tolstoy: The moral responsibility of art -- John Updike: Separating ; Author's perspective, Why write? -- Alice Walker: Everyday use ; Author's perspective, Walker: The Black woman writer in America -- Eudora Welty: Why I live at the P.O. ; Author's perspective, Welty: The plot of the short story -- Edith Wharton: Roman fever ; Author's perspective, Wharton: The subject of short stories -- Virginia Woolf: A haunted house ; Author's perspective, Woolf: Women and fiction. Contents: Part III. Writing. The elements of short fiction -- Writing about fiction -- Critical approaches to literature. Formalist criticism: Light and darkness in "Sonny's Blues" / Michael Clark -- Biographical criticism: Chekhov's attitude to romantic love / Virginia Llewellyn Smith -- Historical criticism: The Argentine context of Borges's fantastic fiction / John King -- Psychological criticism: The father-figure in "The tell-tale heart" / Daniel Hoffman -- Mythological criticism: Myth in Faulkner's "Barn Burning" / Edmond Volpe -- "Sociological criticism: Money and labor in "The rocking-horse winner" / Daniel P. Watkins -- Gender criticism: Gender and pathology in "The yellow wallpaper" / Juliann Fleenor -- Reader-response criticism: An Eskimo "A Rose for Emily" / Stanley Fish -- Deconstructionist criticism: The death of the author / Roland Barthes -- Cultural studies: What is cultural studies? / Makr Bauerlein. Part IV. Glossary of literary terms.

    Punctuation reveals the writer: haphazard commas, for example, reveal haphazard thinking; clear, lucid breaks reveal clear, lucid thinking. Punctuation can be used to teach the writer how to think and how to write. This short, practical book shows authors the benefits that can be reaped from mastering punctuation: the art of style, sentence length, meaning, and economy of words. There are full-length chapters devoted to the period, the comma, the semicolon, the colon, quotation marks, the dash and parentheses, the paragraph and section break, and a cumulative chapter on integrating them all into "The Symphony of Punctuation." Filled with exercises and examples from literary masters (Why did Poe and Melville rely on the semicolon? Why did Hemingway embrace the period?), A Dash of Style is interactive, highly engaging, and a necessity for creative writers as well as for anyone looking to make punctuation their friend instead of their mysterious foe.

    This ultimate insider's guide reveals the secrets that none dare admit, told by a show biz veteran who's proven that you can sell your script if you can save the cat!

    I write poetry... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it. —Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled Stephen Fry believes that if one can speak and read English, one can write poetry. Many of us have never been taught to read or write poetry and think of it as a mysterious and intimidating form. Or, if we have been taught, we remember uncomfortable silence when an English teacher invited the class to "respond" to a poem. In The Ode Less Travelled, Fry sets out to correct this problem by giving aspiring poets the tools and confidence they need to write poetry for pleasure. Fry is a wonderfully engaging teacher and writer of poetry himself, and he explains the various elements of poetry in simple terms, without condescension. His enjoyable exercises and witty insights introduce the concepts of Metre, Rhyme, Form, Diction, and Poetics. Aspiring poets will learn to write a sonnet, on ode, a villanelle, a ballad, and a haiku, among others. Along the way, he introduces us to poets we've heard of, but never read. The Ode Less Travelled is a lively celebration of poetry that makes even the most reluctant reader want to pick up a pencil and give it a try. BACKCOVER: Advanced Praise: “Delightfully erudite, charming and soundly pedagogical guide to poetic form… Fry has created an invaluable and highly enjoyable reference book.” —Publishers Weekly “A smart, sane and entertaining return to the basics… If you like Fry’s comic manner… this book has a lot of charm… People entirely fresh to the subject could do worse than stick with his cheerful leadership.” —The Telegraph (UK) “…intelligent and informative, a worthy enterprise well executed.” —Observer (UK) "If you learn how to write a sonnet, and Fry shows you how, you may or may not make a poem. But you will unlock the stored wisdom of the form itself." —Grey Gowrie, The Spectator (UK) “…intelligent and informative, a worthy enterprise well executed.” —Observer (UK)

    Insight and creativity - the desire to push the boundaries of your writing - strike when you least expect it. And you're often in no position to act: in the shower, driving the kids to school...in the middle of the night.The 3 A.M. Epiphany offers more than 200 intriguing writing exercises designed to help you think, write, and revise like never before - without having to wait for creative inspiration. Brian Kiteley, noted author and director of the University of Denver's creative writing program, has crafted and refined these exercises through 15 years of teaching experience.You'll learn how to:Transform staid and stale writing patterns into exciting experiments in fictionShed the anxieties that keep you from reaching your full potential as a writerCraft unique ideas by combining personal experience with unrestricted imaginationExamine and overcome all of your fiction writing concerns, from getting started to writer's blockOpen the book, select an exercise, and give it a try. It's just what you need to craft refreshing new fiction, discover bold new insights, and explore what it means to be a writer.It's never too early to start--not even 3 A.M.

    The ability to employ rhetoric successfully can enable the student, as an effective communicator, to reflect qualities of soul through argument. In that sense, rhetoric is much more than a technical skill. Crider addresses the intelligent university student with respect and humor. This short but serious book is informed by both the ancient rhetorical tradition and recent discoveries concerning the writing process. Though practical, it is not simply a "how-to" manual; though philosophical, it never loses sight of writing itself. Crider combines practical guidance about how to improve an academic essay with reflection on the final purposes—educational, political, and philosophical—of such improvement.

    Create Complex CharactersHow do you create a main character readers won't forget? How do you write a book in multiple-third-person point of view without confusing your readers (or yourself)? How do you plant essential information about a character's past into a story?Write Great Fiction: Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint by award-winning author Nancy Kress answers all of these questions and more! This accessible book is filled with interactive exercises and valuable advice that teaches you how to: •Choose and execute the best point of view for your story•Create three-dimensional and believable characters•Develop your characters' emotions•Create realistic love, fight, and death scenes•Use frustration to motivate your characters and drive your storyWith dozens of excerpts from some of today's most popular writers, Write Great Fiction: Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint provides you with the techniques you need to create characters and stories sure to linger in the hearts and minds of agents, editors, and readers long after they've finished your book.

    According to author and acquisitions editor W. Terry Whalin, this approach is backwards. About 80% to 90% of nonfiction books are sold from a book proposal. This mysterious document called a proposal contains many elements that will never appear in a manuscript―yet these details are critical to publishing executives who make the decision about publishing or rejecting an author’s project. In Book Proposals That Sell, Terry reveals 21 secrets to creating a book proposal that every author needs in order to create one that sells.

    But it’s a skill you must cultivate to succeed: You’ll lose time, money, and influence if your e-mails, proposals, and other important documents fail to win people over.The HBR Guide to Better Business Writing , by writing expert Bryan A. Garner, gives you the tools you need to express your ideas clearly and persuasively so clients, colleagues, stakeholders, and partners will get behind them. This book will help you:• Push past writer’s block• Grab—and keep—readers’ attention• Earn credibility with tough audiences• Trim the fat from your writing• Strike the right tone• Brush up on grammar, punctuation, and usage

    You'll learn to capitalize on your writing strengths and shore up your weaknesses.This comprehensive guide covers every aspect of mystery writing, including:planning, twisting the plot, and constructing a credible surprise endingcreating a compelling sleuth and a worthy villaindeceiving and revealing with red herrings and clueswriting investigation, spine-tingling suspense, and dramatic actionrevising - from sharpening characters, to optimizing pace, to smithing wordsengaging the readerBy the time you finish reading part one of this book, you will have a blueprint for your entire story. Parts two and three take your blueprint from idea to well-polished novel. Part four is an insider's guide to getting it into an agent's or publisher's hands.-

    Then write your own. I plan to.Tom Romano, author of Crafting Authentic VoiceFor twenty years Penny Kittle has woven together artful teaching and a love of language, celebrating the written word with classes from elementary school through graduate school. Now, she shares the stories of students with whom she's celebrated, struggled, and learned. More than a teaching memoir, The Greatest Catch is a close-up look at how to teach powerful lessons and how to learn powerful lessons from teachingespecially from teaching writing.Kittle teaches her students that writing is a tool for developing their intellectual, academic, and emotional selves, and in these essays, she shows how both she and her students' lives have been profoundly influenced by writing. You'll look over her shoulder as she tries to win over a mischievous third grader, works with a fifth-grade alcoholic, and attempts to make sense of her profession as she watches secondary students drop out of school. And in each instance, you'll see how writing can provide an outlet for difficult feelings, build connections and community, or foster resiliency in writers of any age.Best of all, The Greatest Catch is a model for your own professional development. In addition to her inspirational and pragmatic stories, Kittle includes Craft Notes that demonstrate how she composed her essays so that you can use the same strategies for your classroom life. You'll find these tools immediately useful for structuring reflective writing that helps you uncover the many layers of meaning in your work, just as Kittle, herself, has.Join Penny Kittle in the journey of a teaching lifetime and learn from her experience. Begin with any essay in The Greatest Catch or read it cover to cover. You'll find that no matter where you start you'll end up at the same place: inspired to teach, write, and learn.

    It allows teachers to pinpoint students’ strengths and weaknesses in ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation, and focus instruction. Now Culham turns her expert eye to our youngest students. Like her groundbreaking guide for grades 3 and up, her new book contains scoring guides, sample papers, and focus lessons for each trait, but framed to address K–2 teachers’ needs. For use with Grades K-2.Book Details: Format: Paperback Publication Date: 6/1/2005 Pages: 304 Reading Level: Age 5 and Up

    What We Ache For is a moving and eloquent call to delve deeply into our creative selves, to do our creative work, and offer it to the world.The creative process is essential to human nature. It is as essential as spirituality and sexuality, and in fact all three are deeply intertwined. What We Ache For is a practical book allowing readers to embrace the urgency and necessity of their creativity, whatever their medium -- writing, painting, sculpture, dance, music, or film. As Oriah says, "Doing creative work allows us to follow the thread of what we ache for into a deeper life, offering us a way to cultivate a life of making love to the world."Following Oriah through this journey in such chapters as "The Seduction of the Artist," "Learning to See," and "Risk and Sacrifice," What We Ache For challenges and inspires readers to fully embrace their artistic selves as a way of forging a path of spiritual unfolding.

    Eric Maisel, a leading creativity coach, writes each lesson with a novelist's flair, as a narrative complete with examples, exercises, and questions to help readers explore and reflect on underlying issues that may be keeping them from pursuing their urge to create. Topics include committing, planning and doing, generating mental energy, achieving a centered presence, becoming an anxiety expert, upholding your dream, and maintaining a creative life. Maisel has worked extensively with creative people — poets, filmmakers, novelists, dancers — and he revisits some of them in coaching sessions in San Francisco, Paris, London, and New York. Typical are the rock musician who wants to pursue a solo career and the screenwriter anxious to become a poet. Their examples both entertain and instruct, outlining how to discover one's personal muse — and the motivation to keep creating.

    Working with familiar material, students explore their lives, learn new and sophisticated elements of craft, and engage deeply with content to uncover personal and universal meaning. By teaching with memoir, you can help students exceed official standards for writing, both in class work and on tests, while also giving them a tool for making sense of their place in the world.In Writing a Life, Katherine Bomer presents classroom-tested strategies for tapping memoir's power, including ways to help kids generate ideas to write about, elaborate on and make meaning from their memories, and learn craft from published memoirs. She describes dozens of ideas for minilessons, teacherstudent conferences, peer conferences, writing activities, prompts, and revision strategies. She then crosses the literacy spectrum to show how studying mentor memoirs can enrich students' reading by building strong reading-writing connections. In addition, Bomer presents a curricular unit that prepares students for writing tests by systematically and explicitly helping them transfer the content and skills they develop in writing memoir to the demands of standardized assessments.Every student has a story to share. With Writing a Life, you'll have the inspiration, the strategies, and the materials you need to help them write it beautifully.

    It is a complete resource for anyone who wants to write and produce for a television drama series or create an original series, as well as for teachers in screenwriting classes and workshops. Offering practical industry information and artistic encouragement, the book is both nuts-and-bolts and inspiration. The Third Edition leads readers into the future and engages provocative issues about the interface between traditional TV and emerging technologies and endless possibilities.

    Thompson, and Gay Talese launched the New Journalism movement, Robert S. Boynton sits down with nineteen practitioners of what he calls the New New Journalism to discuss their methods, writings and careers.The New New Journalists are first and foremost brilliant reporters who immerse themselves completely in their subjects. Jon Krakauer accompanies a mountaineering expedition to Everest. Ted Conover works for nearly a year as a prison guard. Susan Orlean follows orchid fanciers to reveal an obsessive subculture few knew existed. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spends nearly a decade reporting on a family in the South Bronx. And like their muckraking early twentieth-century precursors, they are drawn to the most pressing issues of the day: Alex Kotlowitz, Leon Dash, and William Finnegan to race and class; Ron Rosenbaum to the problem of evil; Michael Lewis to boom-and-bust economies; Richard Ben Cramer to the nitty gritty of politics. How do they do it? In these interviews, they reveal the techniques and inspirations behind their acclaimed works, from their felt-tip pens, tape recorders, long car rides, and assumed identities; to their intimate understanding of the way a truly great story unfolds. Interviews with: Gay TaleseJane Kramer*Calvin TrillinRichard Ben Cramer*Ted Conover*Alex Kotlowitz*Richard Preston*William Langewiesche*Eric SchlosserLeon DashWilliam FinneganJonathan Harr*Jon Krakauer*Adrian Nicole LeBlancMichael Lewis*Susan OrleanRon RosenbaumLawrence Weschler*Lawrence Wright** Search our online catalog to find other titles by these Vintage and Anchor Books authors.

    It presents balanced instruction and real-world examples that will ensure professional and flawless work on every occasion.

    Loaded with student examples and reproducible forms, the 30 lessons in Reviving the Essay will "supercharge" your students' minds with patterns and ideas that will transform their esays from lockstep, generic assignments to well-considered opinions offered in authentic, creative voices.

    Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces written for great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood's worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize–winning author's reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell's 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk's Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood's career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.

    Bob Mayer argues that for most, the one most common obstacle standing in the way is fear. Who Dares Wins shares the time-tested techniques of the Special Forces, proven elite warriors trained to conquer fear, dare to be different, and accomplish what others consider impossible. Mayer outlines specific steps for discovering what is holding you back and offers hands-on exercises for increasing motivation to reach those goals. Bringing his unique blend of practical Special Operations Strategies and Tactics mixed with the vision of an artist, Mayer helps readers get to know themselves, identify blind spots, and overcome fear to achieve success. "Bob Mayer gives us a unique and valuable window into the shadowy world of our country’s elite fighting forces and how you can apply many of the concepts and strategies they use for success in your own life and organization." —Jack Canfield, creator of the Chicken Soup book series

    The book manifests enormous learning and real wisdom in applying that erudition to the needs of contemporary readers.”—Harold Bloom“The importance of this book is that it makes clear what we ought to mean when we call Shakespeare an artist in language…The average person today knows two figures of speech if he knows any…Shakespeare knew two hundred.”—Mark Van Doren, New York Herald TribuneAs part of their education in the trivium (the liberal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric), grammar school students in Shakespeare’s time were taught to recognize the two hundred figures of speech that Renaissance scholars had derived from Latin and Greek sources. Sister Miriam Joseph views this theory of composition as integral to Shakespeare’s mastery of language. In her classic 1947 book, she lays out these figures of speech in simple, understandable patterns and explains each one with examples from Shakespeare. Her analysis of his plays and poems illustrates that the Bard knew more about rhetoric than perhaps anyone else.Sister Miriam Joseph (1898–1982) earned her doctorate from Columbia University. A member of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, Sister Miriam was professor of English at Saint Mary’s College from 1931 to 1960.

    Personal-writing pioneer Christina Baldwin first draws on examples from history and mythology to show how stories do indeed change events. She then shows readers how to apply this idea to their own narratives, acknowledging and reclaiming them both the positive and the negative aspects to realize a better future within their families, workplaces, faith traditions, and even nations. Each chapter features suggestions, examples, and anecdotes to get people thinking and writing about their own lives."

    It's the same reason those on the path of spiritual formation find that creative exercises lead them into a deeper, more authentic experience with God. Creative work is soul work, and soul work is always creative work. Feeding one while neglecting the other will leave you restless and unsatisfied. Nurturing them both will lead you to new places of self-discovery and God-discovery. "I believe that spirituality and creativity are intricately connected, yet they are rarely nurtured and talked about that way," contends Vinita Hampton Wright. In these pages she leads you through the process and practice of integrating the worlds of Christian spirituality and creativity. You will find both inspiration and practical help forembracing the life that chooses youunderstanding the spiritual process of creativityfacing the self you have to deal withcomprehending the relationship of sexuality to both art and souldeveloping a supportive community for your workthriving as a creative person in the real worldThe Soul Tells a Story helps you to turn frustrated longings into satisfying growth.

    Those familiar with Ernest Holmes' writings and the Science of Mind principles that he espoused will enjoy the long anticipated reunion with some of their favorite passages; those who are new to them will delight in the discovery of these classics of New Thought. All readers will find Holmes' meditations to be practical, insightful, and more than satisfying food for the hungry soul.Matthew Fox, PhD: "These prayers ennoble the soul and enable one's work in the world as well, drawing as they do on deep sources of Scriptural wisdom and the quiet insight of a great heart, that of Ernest Holmes. They awaken us and empower us to put joy before sorrow and affirmation ahead of negativity and truth before denial. Great medicine for our times!"Jean Houston, PhD: "Ernest Holmes was one of the first to direct us to what is to be found in the vast ecology of inner space . . . He shows us how to be active and creative citizens in a Universe and Innerverse richer than all previous imaginings."Julia Cameron: "Creative Ideas hands us the keys to the kingdom. We are wealthy and beautiful beyond our dreams. This tiny book of prayers will open your heart to its natural generosity toward life. We are each far more than we imagine, and becoming that "more" is what these small prayers will bring about."

    And when it comes to advice on best practices for assessment, there's no better source than Carl Anderson's "Assessing Writers." Like he did in the popular and highly acclaimed "How's It Going?," Anderson offers smart, ready-to-use ideas for assessment. "Assessing Writers" offers practical methods for gathering information about every writer in your classroom and shows you how to create writing lessons that address the needs of individual students as well as the whole class.Anderson's straightforward approach helps you imagine an ongoing assessment program that takes you from meeting new students to designing curriculum. In "Assessing Writers" you'll find out: what you need to know about students to assess them as writers how to uncover and make sense of this information how to make an individualized plan for each student how to use these plans when you confer how to structure units of study to meet classroom-wide needs. Let Carl Anderson be your guide as you place assessment at the center of writing instruction. With a wealth of smart suggestions, useful charts, reproducible rubrics, and activities for professional reflection, Assessing Writers gives you powerful tools that make assessment simple and effective.

    What the industry's most succcessful writers and directors have in common is that they have mastered the cinematic conventions specific to the medium.

    Her first book, "A Woman of Substance, " is one of the bestselling novels of all time and has made her one of the most successful authors in the world. Yet her rise to fame and fortune was not an easy one. Barbara came from humble beginnings in Yorkshire, the only daughter of a laborer and a nanny. From an early age, her mother Freda had marked her daughter out for glory---at any cost. This drive, ambition, and desire to triumph helped Barbara take the "Yorkshire Evening Post" and Fleet Street by storm. But her biggest achievement was undeniably "A Woman of Substance." The novel's unforgettable heroine, Emma Harte, was a powerful, success-fuelled woman whose rise from kitchen maid to international business woman was an inspiration to women the world over. Emma's life is a testament to Barbara's imagination but here, for the first time, Piers Dudgeon unearths amazing parallels in the lives of Barbara's fictional characters and her real-life family. More remarkable still is that Barbara herself was previously completely unaware of these deeply buried secrets. In this incredible story, fact and fiction exist side by side and art unwittingly imitates life. This is the first time Barbara Taylor Bradford has collaborated on a memoir of her amazing life. Full of revelations, it's as absorbing a read as any one of her bestsellers.

    Suitable for use by students, tutors, writers' groups or writers working alone, this book offers:A practical and inspiring section on the creative process, showing you how to stimulate your creativity and use your memory and experience in inventive ways in-depth coverage of the most popular forms of writing, in extended sections on fiction, poetry and life writing, including biography and autobiography, giving you practice in all three forms so that you might discover and develop your particular strengths a sensible, up-to-date guide to going public, to help you to edit your work to a professional standard and to identify and approach suitable publishers a distinctive collection of exciting exercises, spread throughout the workbook to spark your imagination and increase your technical flexibility and control a substantial array of illuminating readings, bringing together extracts from contemporary and classic writings in order to demonstrate a range of techniques that you can use or adapt in your own work.Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings presents a unique opportunity to benefit from the advice and experience of a team of published authors who have also taught successful writing courses at a wide range of institutions, helping large numbers of new writers to develop their talents as well as their abilities to evaluate and polish their work to professional standards. These institutions include Lancaster University and the University of East Anglia, renowned as consistent producers of published writers.

    Experience it not as a tourist but as a creator, where you dedicate yourself to the bohemian writing life in picturesque parks, cafes, and bookstores.Writers and other creative souls will be captivated by the metaphor and reality of Paris as the artist's true home, and how it can inspire you to create. Authored by today's leading creativity coach, Eric Maisel, it's an inspirational read, and a dream journey for creatives.

    This dynamic title: Is jam-packed with 1,001 creative prompts - more than any other book on the market Provides a spectrum of prompts, including situational, dialogue oriented, and point-of-view changing exercises Shares dozens of sidebars containing humorous and inspiring quotes from famous authors about the writing life, idea creation, and writer's block With appendices that show writers how to adapt the prompts in new and exciting ways, this book of writing matches will ignite writers' creative fires for years to come.

    Weinberg -- author of more than forty books and more than 400 articles over a forty-year career -- reveals his secrets for gathering, organizing, and discarding writing ideas. Drawing an analogy to the stone-by-stone method of building fieldstone walls, Weinberg shows writers how to construct fiction and nonfiction manuscripts from key insights, stories, and quotes. The elements, or stones, are collected nonsequentially, over time, and eventually find logical places in larger pieces. The method renders writer's block irrelevant and has proved effective for scores of Weinberg's writing class students, who have collectively published more than 100 books. If you've ever wanted to write a book or article -- or need a fresh approach to your writing career -- try what works for Weinberg and gather your best ideas into beautiful stone walls. Gerald M. Weinberg is one of the most influential thinkers in computer science. Weinberg on Writing isn't a computer book, though -- Weinberg describes his life and practices as a writer, enriching the text with more than 40 exercises appropriate for individual or group study. Inducted into the Computer Hall of Fame in its inaugural year (in the same class as Bill Gates), Weinberg's career highlights have included computer programming at IBM for Project Mercury (which put the first American in space), serving on the faculty of famed family therapist Virginia Satir, consulting for Fortune 500 companies through his firm, Weinberg & Weinberg, and teaching thousands of technical professionals how to improve their communication skills.

    The answers are supported by thousands of up-to-date published usage examples. And the reader is told not just that particular usages are right or wrong, but why. In addition, Right, Wrong, and Risky  warns the reader about risky words like cleave and suspicious, and the many risky situations in which usage authorities disagree about what is and is not acceptable in Standard American English. For every such quandary, this book provides a risk-free solution. Browsers will learn why we tell stage performers to break a leg, why it's not really an insult to call someone a philistine or even a Neanderthal, and why it's wise never to use the word fortuitous or say the word forte aloud.

    Don't Forget to Write has exactly that: 54 great writing lesson plans road-tested at 826 writing labs across the country. These range from goofy fun classes like "Writing for Pets," to more practical workshops like "College Application Essay Boot Camp," and all were written by experts. Our favorite authors pitched in, too. If you're a teacher, we think this book will make your life easier. If you're an aspiring writer, we've got lots of great ideas for you too. And if you're a reader, we offer entertainment and food for thought — 54 lesson plans' worth.Written and used by workshop teachers at 826 Valendcia, 826LA, and 826NYC.

    For without first considering the experience of reading stories--seriously, thoroughly, the way Sexton does--you can't possibly write one worth reading. --Tara McCarthy, author of Love Will Tear Us ApartMany writers believe that if they just find the right teacher or workshop, their writing will reach new heights of skill. But why not learn from the best? In his popular workshops in New York City, creative writing instructor Adam Sexton has found that the most effective way for any writer to grasp on the elements of fiction is to study the great masters. Master Class in Fiction Writing is your personal crash course in creative writing, with the world's most accomplished fiction writers as your guides.You will learn:The art of characterization from Jane AustenStyle and voice from Ernest HemingwayDialogue from Iris MurdochDescription from Vladimir NabokovThe timeless techniques of plotting in the work of Joseph ConradThe ingenious structure of James JoycePoint of view from Toni MorrisonOver the course of just ten chapters you can master all the components of great short story and novel writing. These are the most important lessons any writer can learn--a truly novel approach to writing that will enrich, inform, and inspire.

    Replaces WRITE NOW: The Complete Program For Better Handwriting (2nd edition).

    "The Write-Brain Workbook" is the first of its kind–an easy, fun, and playful way to exercise your creative writing muscles each day.Eliminate the dreaded emptiness of the blank pageWrite without the pressure of preconceived expectationsLearn about your own unique writing processBuild the momentum of a quick daily writing practiceUnlock writer's blockApply the breakthroughs from daily practice to your "real" writingExpand how you see yourself as a writerExperiment with different ways to approach writingAffirm your commitment to being a writer"The Write-Brain Workbook" is bursting with 366 innovative exercises that let you experiment and play with words and styles. Whether you love the pure joy of writing, are just getting started, or are trying to get past a particular writing block ... this is the book you've been waiting for!

    This nuts-and-bolts guide - complete with practical exercises at the end of each chapter - gives you all the tips and techniques you need to:Establish a realistic sense of time and placeUse description and setting to drive your storyCraft effective description and setting for different genresSkillfully master showing vs. tellingWith dozens of excerpts from some of today's most popular writers, Write Great Fiction: Description & Setting gives you all the information you need to create a sharp and believable world of people, places, events, and actions.

    Most of us in the theatre gained our experience by making mistakes and learning from them. David's book lets you gain the experience and skip the mistakes part. Anyone maneuvering the treacherous waters of musicals will find it not nearly so lonely or baffling with this remarkable volume as a companion.Richard Maltby, Jr., Director/Lyricist, Miss Saigon, Ain't Misbehavin', BabyConsider The Musical Theatre Writer's Survival Guide your new best friend in the business.Alan Menken, Oscar recipient and Tony-Award nominee, composer, Little Shop of Horrors and Beauty and the BeastAt long last: a how-to book written by someone who actually knows how to. It hits so many nails on the head I could barely get through it for the sound of all that hammering.Larry Gelbart, Award-winning co-librettist, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and librettist, City of AngelsFor its practitioners, musical theatre is an art, a passion, and a lifelong love. But it's also a complex landscape involving not merely principles of craft about book, music and lyrics, but also principles of collaboration, script/demo presentation, project/production development, venue, business, andeverybody's area of uncertaintypolitics.In The Musical Theatre Writer's Survival Guide, award-winning musical dramatist and teacher David Spencer provides a guide-to-the-game that helps you negotiate all those aspects of the business and more. This professional handbook will walk you through:getting your name and your projects into the hands of producers, instead of the rejection pile choosing the right producer, agent, or director, instead of surrounding yourself with people uninterested in your work and your career-or interested for the wrong reasons bringing your vision to life through stage-savvy writing, instead of watching it sputter due to flaws in craft living a happy, healthy life in musicals, instead of dying a slow, showbiz death. If you're taking your first steps, Spencer's counsel, anecdotes, and instructions will save you years of blindly stumbling about without results. Likewise, if you've been around the block a few times, The Musical Theatre Writer's Survival Guide can rescue you from the kinds of career-stalling traps, bad habits, and false assumptions that lead to dead ends.

    Through four distinct historical units, the author looks at the development of the short story as a genre. The historical introductions and visual spreads that begin each unit help instructors and students place the stories they read in a broader context. In addition to delineating the history and future of the short story, the anthology provides a comprehensive collection of classical and traditional stories and demonstrates the liveliness, flexibility, and dynamic nature of the genre. This dual focus grounds students in the tradition of the short story genre and gives them an appreciation for its contemporary context. Unlike many introductions to short fiction, this anthology includes a strong representation of newer works by international and American writers.

    Based on a revolutionary translation method, and inspired by Carl Jung’s insights into the psyche, The Original I Ching Oracle offers Western readers the closest possible approach to the true content of the ancient Chinese oracle. By cutting through layers of philosophical analysis and recovering the original images of the I Ching, it puts readers in contact with a deep universal dimension of the human psyche, as present today as it was for the shamans in China over 3,000 years ago.

    They provide a high-comfort, "hot-house" environment where students' writing can flourish. "Lessons for the Writer's Notebook" by Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi provides a series of proven lessons that will help you introduce the writer's notebook into your classroom, sustain it in your curriculum, and eventually guide students to transition from the privacy of the notebook to public, finished pieces of writing. Whether used as a stand-alone resource in your literacy block, or as an alternative launch cycle in your "Teaching the Qualities of Writing (TQW)" curriculum, "Lessons for the Writer's Notebook" will inspire your students to pick up a pen and imagine the writing possibilities. "Lessons for the Writer's Notebook" includes: Lesson Cards 20 ready-to-use lessons exemplar text graphic organizers Author Chats CD quick audio clips from Ralph explain how he uses his writer's notebook Teacher's Guide "Notebook's" philosophy planning charts teaching tips"Lessons for the Writer's Notebook" and "Teaching the Qualities of Writing (TQW)" While "Lessons for the Writers Notebook" will support any writing curriculum, it is ideally suited to reinforce and extend Portalupi and Fletcher's "Teaching the Qualities of Writing (TQW)." Mirroring the approach and three-part lesson structure of "TQW"'s ready-to-use lessons, the "Lessons for the Writer's Noteboo"k offers an alternative launch cycle for introducing your "TQW" curriculum. Together, "Notebook" and "TQW" will improve the quality of your students' writing while it develops your ability to read and assess their work.

    During the 20th century, Edward de Vere, the most flamboyant of the courtier poets, a man of the theater and literary patron, became the leading candidate for an alternative Shakespeare. This text presents the controversial argument for de Vere's authorship of the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare, offering the available historical evidence and moreover the literary evidence to be found within the works. Divided into sections on the comedies and romances, the histories and the tragedies and poems, this fresh study closely analyzes each of the 39 plays and the sonnets in light of the Oxfordian authorship theory. The vagaries surrounding Shakespeare, including the lack of information about him during his lifetime, especially relating to the lost years of 1585-1592, are also analyzed, to further the question of Shakespeare's true identity and the theory of de Vere as the real Bard.

    The genre is both complex and controversial, encompassing novels that range from romance and fantasy to stark historical realism. The book examines the various approaches to young adult historical fiction and explores the issues that it has engendered. Part One focuses on the broader issues spawned by the genre itself, including its various subgenres - the line between fiction and fact; to what degree must an author adhere to historical accuracy?; time boundaries; the diary format; the protagonist as the outsider; who is entitled to write what?; and literary concerns such as the relationship between accuracy and readability. Part Two explores issues of contemporary interest, such as race, class, gender, the immigrant experience, religion, war, and nationalism. Thought-provoking discussions of how these elements are treated in historical novels, with emphasis on how current cultural values have shaped the fiction, are presented. Finally, the question of whether novels in this genre are bound by anything other than their respective period setting is posed, and it is contended that there are features common to YA historical novels that not only set the genre apart from other YA fiction, but also contribute something unique to the larger genre. The genesis for much classroom debate, suggestions for class discussions and writing assignments as well as sample written responses of these debates from the authors' classes are included. Teachers, librarians, instructors of young adult literature courses, and teen readers will find this an insightful analysis of YA historical fiction.

    Using two unique step-by-step visual tools for developing and deepening scenes and plot, BBP shows how the pros layer three distinct yet overlapping plotlines - Character Emotional Development, Dramatic Action, and Thematic Plot. When the dramatic action changes the character at depth over time, the story becomes thematically significant. BBP uses the Scene Tracker as a visual tool to track the seven essential elements of scene, side-by-side from the beginning to the end of any project. BBP uses the Plot Planner as a visual place to plot out the action, character and thematic plotlines. Both parts are intended as a step-by-step interactive guide for writers interested in maximizing their scenes and providing depth to their stories. BBP is unique because of its hands-on, down-to-earth multi-sensory approach to learning. BBP provides specific activities linked directly to each writer's individual project. The book is divided between explanation and activity forms. By analyzing scenes and plots from classic and contemporary writers such as Twain, London, and McCarthy, writers learn how to add a dynamic, effective twist to their work. BBP provides writers with the tools and resources to get from where they are - stuck and unable to begin or stuck and unable to finish - to where they want to be - holding a finished project. BBP effectively demonstrates the relationship between scene and plot and explains the principles involved in the art and craft of developing sizzling scenes and compelling plots and story design. BBP offers techniques to help writers maintain faith and enjoy the process of creation.

    Genealogists love to share information about their families, and the very nature of Internet fosters this practice. Probably because there is so much free information on the Web, many individuals have formed the false conclusion that "if it is on the Internet, anyone has a right to use the information as he/she sees fit." Despite the best of intentions, therefore, people will occasionally post content on a website or transmit it by e-mail without proper permission to do so.

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

    A celebration of the domestic arts, Writing Home is for everyone who has ever attempted to combine work, parenthood, and homemaking. It is about reinventing family traditions, losing a parent, growing up, aging gracefully, discovering sense of place, and keeping the faith. Cindy La Ferle's award-winning personal essays and columns have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Reader's Digest, Country Gardens, Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion, The Detroit Free Press, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Royal Oak Daily Tribune, Unity Magazine, and many others.

    

    In nine entertaining and instructive essays, novelist and master teacher Debra Spark pursues key questions that face both aspiring and accomplished writers, including: How does a writer find inspiration? What makes a story's closing line resonate? How can a writer "get" style? Where should an author "stand" in relation to his or her characters?While the book will have immediate appeal for students of writing, it will also be of interest to general readers for its in-depth reading of contemporary fiction and for its take on important issues of the day: Should writers try to be more uplifting? How is emotion best conveyed in fiction? Why are serious writers in North America wedded to the realist tradition?When she was only twenty-three, Debra Spark's best-selling anthology 20 Under 30 introduced readers to some of today's best writers, including David Leavitt, Susan Minot, Lorrie Moore, Ann Patchett, and Mona Simpson. Almost twenty years later, Spark brings this same keen critical eye to Curious Attractions, discussing a broad range of authors from multiple genres and generations.A collection of essays in the belles-lettres tradition, Curious Attractions offers lively and instructive discussions of craft flavored with autobiographical reflections and commentary on world events. Throughout, Spark's voice is warm, articulate, and engaging as it provides valuable insights to readers and writers alike.

    It will allow you to look at a book design and immediately see the common errors and to see that a book is following the traditions of good book design that gives credibility to your message. Whether you do the work yourself of hire it done, BOOK DESIGN AND PRODUCTION will help you get your book done right. Use this book to guide you through the book design and production process.

    Provides a clear, step-by step map for achieving sucess in each of the three major book-writing fields for children--fiction, nonfiction, and picture books.

    Out of print for several years, this expanded and updated edition of the book is based on research carried out by the author in Sydney. Parts were first published in a brochure Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes by the Newspaper Advertising Bureau. It created a furor in the publishing and advertising industry because while it supports some old mores, it demolishes others. As David Ogilvy says in the foreword: "Hitherto designers have had to rely on their guesses as to what works best... all too often they guess wrong. Thanks to Colin Wheildon they no longer have to guess. No guesswork here. Only facts." Previously published as Type & Layout: How Typography and Design can Get Your Message Across or Get in the Way, by Strathmoor Press, Inc., Berkeley, California, USA. ISBN 0962489158

    Avoidingtraditional thesauruses’ mundane synonym choices,Peter E. Meltzer puts each word—whether it’s protrepic,apostrophize, iracund, or emulous—in context by usingexamples from a broad range of contemporary books,periodicals, and newspapers. His new introductionmakes the case for why we should widen our vocabularyand use the one right word. This groundbreakingthesaurus remains a unique venture, one that enrichesyour writing while helping you find the perfect word.

    Presents a framework for examining the existence and function of formulaic language and tests it extensively against language data within a wide variety of language samples. Formulaic language is a fast-growing area of applied linguistic research, and the author is a key figure in this field.

    When poverty, emigration, and political turmoil in the fictional world oblige Flamingo's characters to disperse, the one-eyed protagonist Alva solicits Flamingo's help to bring them back together. The innovative novel is organized as a writers' notebook and sprinkled with recipes, herbal remedies, dream interpretations, and various other interjections evoking the culture and traditions of Jamaica.

    Naked Playwriting also offers sound guidance on marketing and submitting play scripts for both contests and production, protecting one's copyright, and working with directors and theater companies. Well-written, comprehensive, and filled with illustrative examples, Naked Playwriting includes both innovative and tried-and-true writing techniques, sage advice from veteran writers, a short study of the major schools of dramatic thought, and writing anecdotes. This one-of-a-kind playwriting book, which covers both the basics of playwriting and the practical advice on getting a play published and produced, will help both novices and working writers discover and improve their playwriting skills and see their plays performed on a stage.

    She takes the reader on an energizing pilgrimage of their own bodies, exploring each part as a portal through which vital, creative, divine energy is received and released. This book fosters self-love, spiritual empowerment, and social consciousness by allowing readers to see their bodies as channels for expressing the Divine. Divining the Body leads readers into a milieu of reverence, mystery, and delight, helping them discover a redeemed sense of self. Readers will learn to trade self-defeating thoughts and behaviors for actions that are healing for themselves and others.

    It can guide you through life's transitions, reveal parts of yourself yearning to be expressed, and even transmit the essence of who you are to inspire future generations. On Lifelines, the visionary who started the personal writing movement shows you how to save your life in all these ways and more-with only a pen and paper. Now you have access to her most powerful techniques, including: "Flow writing"-a jump-start exercise to get you writing right away Using third person narrative to view your life from a new perspective "Godalogues"-a powerful way to receive guidance from the divine, and much more.

    A fresh approach to grammar through a set of interlinked grammar resources - reference book, practice book, interactive CD-ROM.

    The most comprehensive work of its kind, the volume encompasses both cognitive and sociocultural perspectives. Leading investigators present salient theoretical models; describe cutting-edge research methodologies and analytic tools; summarize available data on the effectiveness of major instructional approaches; and identify key directions for future research. Emphasizing the importance of supporting all students' writing development, the book includes a special section on cultural diversity, gender, special education, and bilingual learners.

    The handbook includes profiles of fifty creative writing programs, guidance through the application process, advice from current students and professors including George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Tracy K. Smith, and Geoffrey Wolff, and the most comprehensive listings of graduate writing programs in and outside the United States. The handbook also includes special sections about Low-Residency writing programs, Ph.D. programs, publishing in literary journals, and workshop and teaching advice.In a remarkably concise, user-friendly fashion, The Creative Writing MFA Handbook answers as many questions as possible, and is packed with information, advice, and experience.

    Students master all the skills necessary to support their own ideas: note-taking from readings, analyzing information, outlining structures, creating thesis statements, authoring introductions and conclusions, and writing and refining drafts. At each stage, students learn how to document evidence, integrate references, paraphrase, synthesize, and summarize.

    Even seasoned scholars typically approach their research in an unsystematic manner, becoming familiar with a particular area of inquiry while remaining largely unaware of what exists in the rest of the field. This inefficient method hinders particularly less-experienced researchers and circumscribes their lines of inquiry. The Nanzan Guide provides both beginners and specialists with a reference that will serve as a basic introduction to Japanese religions and allow them to conduct research more proficiently and in greater depth.Overlapping and thought-provoking chapters, written by leading specialists, offer a variety of perspectives on the complicated and multifaceted field of Japanese religions. The essays are divided into four sections: religious traditions (Japanese religions in general, Shinto, Buddhism, folk religion, new religions, Christianity); the history of Japanese religions (ancient, classical, medieval, early modern, modern, contemporary); major themes (symbolism, ritual and the arts, literature and scripture, state and religion, geography and environment, intellectual history, gender); and practical essays (finding references and using libraries, working with archive collections, conducting fieldwork). A chronology of religion in Japanese history is also provided.

    In addition to solid coverage of the core English vocabulary, including new words and senses, with definitionsthat are concise and easy-to-understand, The Oxford American Large Print Dictionary also includes thousands of difficult and literary words that are most often looked up.It also includes short, accessible notes on difficult spellings, confusable words, and tricky areas of usage. The book's clear page layout, designed in association with Lighthouse International, offers enlarged fonts, larger margins, generous line spacing, and good quality paper, ensuring that thereis a minimum of glare and show-through. And as with all Oxford American dictionaries, the book employs an easy-to-use system to show how entries are pronounced. It uses simple, familiar markings to represent common American English sounds.For visually impaired readers, The Oxford American Large Print Dictionary offers a splendid resource from the unparalleled leader in language reference.

    Add to the off-kilter humor of Napoleon Dynamite by filling in the blanks with the ultimate nerd-hero.  Combine Napoleon's wacky story with Mad Libs, and it's bound to be a "flippin' sweet" time.

    The first book-length treatment of the flowering of American Mennonite writing of the last two decades, this book combines careful scholarship with Jeff Gundy's frank, sometimes sardonic, often funny, deeply engaged commentary on Mennonite writing and culture.

    It is vital to advancing their careers. Later, some are asked to become editors. However, most mathematicians are trained to do mathematics, not to publish it. But here, finally, for graduate students and researchers interested in publishing their work, Steven G. Krantz, the respected author of several how-to guides in mathematics, shares his experience as an author, editor, editorial board member, and independent publisher. This new volume is an informative, comprehensive guidebook to publishing mathematics. Krantz describes both the general setting of mathematical publishing and the specifics about all the various publishing situations mathematicians may encounter. As with his other books, Krantz's style is engaging and frank. He gives advice on how to get your book published, how to get organized as an editor, what to do when things go wrong, and much more. He describes the people, the language (including a glossary), and the process of publishing both books and journals. Steven G. Krantz is an accomplished mathematician and an award-winning author. as an editor of several book series, research journals, and for the Notices of the AMS. He is also the founder of the Journal of Geometric Analysis. Other titles available from the AMS by Steven G. Krantz are How to Teach Mathematics, A Primer of Mathematical Writing, A Mathematician's Survival Guide, and Techniques of Problem Solving

    Each chapter in this student-friendly insider's guide offers a different lesson, complete with definitions, exercises, and a review of the material.

    The hard part for them is putting thoughts together into a cohesive draft. Organizing and planning for writing defy simple description and aren't easily modeled for students, making them challenging topics to convey to young children. Where do you find the language and tactics to teach these subtle processes?With First Grade Writers, Stephanie Parsons will change how you think about teaching the thinking behind writing. Parsons outlines five specific units of study for your writing workshop that help students prepare thoughtfully to write. Beginning with a September unit specially designed to introduce the writing workshop to first graders and build a classroom community that supports risk taking and learning, each successive unit builds upon the previous one and fosters independence. By June your students will know how to plan for writing out loud and on paper, leading to elegant, well-structured pieces. The units also help children to differentiate the planning and organization needed to write:fiction personal narrative nonfiction Q & A books pattern books. Best of all, First Grade Writers is corner-of-the-desk practical with concise, logically laid-out descriptions of how each unit of study operates, a variety of helpful tables, charts, and assessment diagnostics, as well as elaborations, teaching points for minilessons and conferences, troubleshooting tips, and month-by-month planning assistance. If you're new to first grade, Stephanie Parsons will give you ideas for top-notch teaching that will be invaluable as you establish your first writing workshop. If you're a veteran, the units in First Grade Writers will augment your existing workshop and help your students clearly conceptualize what high-quality writing looks like. Either way, you'll help them write better by thinking about the thinking behind good writing.

    The personal essay is short, easy to read, and poignant. It permits experienced and beginning writers alike to develop manuscripts and get them published in a timely manner. And the personal essay is ennobling; it affirms the universal humanity in the large and small details of the writer's life. In Writing and Publishing Personal Essays, Sheila Bender shares her tested and proven techniques for developing personal essays. She discusses eight different types of essays and offers step-by-step instructions for writing each.She demonstrates her effective Three-Step Response Method for obtaining meaningful and useful feedback from readers and includes essays written by students and professionals to illustrate the different types of essays. She devotes a special chapter to suggestions and resources for editing riting well and getting published. This is an important book. Brenda Miller, author of Season of the Body: Essays and Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, says Sheila Bender is an extraordinary teacher in person and on the page. In Writing and Publishing Personal Essays, her enthusiasm, her wit, and her expertise provide us with exciting ways to approach the art of creative nonfiction. This book is chock full of useful instructions and prompts that will keep you writing a long time. In Writing and Publishing Personal Essays, Sheila Bender's adds numerous new essay examples and updated publishing and editing information to the content of her important, previously published book, Writing Personal Essays: How to Shape Your Life Experiences for the Page ( Writer's Digest Books, 1995). Sheila isthe author of eleven other books and of essays that have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.

    Canada’s “form poetry” arises from the country’s distinct geography and cultural mix, with subjects ranging from physical work like farming and fishing, to the French influence, to more timeless natural and abstract themes. This anthology, beginning in the 16th century, is arranged by sections, one for each form, with a brief introduction to that form’s conventions and variations. The poems in each section appear chronologically (by birth date of poet) to show historical and modern examples that showcase the best the country has produced.

    But increasingly, colleges and universities have thrown open their gates and made a public turn toward school-community partnerships, bringing literacy activities to the streets and service-learning opportunities to faculty, staff, and student volunteers.Paula Mathieu is one such faculty volunteer, and in Tactics of Hope she examines the workings behind the public turn in composition studies at several institutions. Recounting various types of initiatives, she describes how these ideas for outreach were received by both local residents and members of the campus, and she outlines how each side worked together to relieve town-gown tensions. More important, Mathieu examines why a tactical, not strategic, approach to outreach provides the most flexibility for all involved and creates the best opportunities for real learning and deeper interaction between volunteers and their community.Outside the dormitories, the classrooms, and the gates of every university live people who can benefit from public-academic partnerships. And on the inside of those very same structures are people who can benefit equally. Read Tactics of Hope and discover ideas and tactics for tapping the transformative power of learning on and from the streets.

    Based on the work of real K–2 students, What's Next for This Beginning Writer shows teachers how to interpret student work, identify what they know, and build naturally on the writing strengths their work displays. A series of Writing Workshop lessons show teachers how to talk with students to celebrate their work, extend their learning, and set goals for their next piece of writing. This comprehensive book includes mini-lessons that build on the student's work, group and whole-class activities, student samples, tips for keeping parents informed, and a list of recommended children's books.

    Whether you teach one or several subjects, Practical Poetry includes chapters specially written to show you how to promote content understanding and meaning-making in language arts, math, science, and social studies by taking poems out of the artsy ether and making them functional. Even if you aren't a poet, you'll be ready to use poetry in your class tomorrow because each of Holbrook's lessons:describes the rationale for how and why the lessons work identifies the specific content standards you'll be addressing in your teaching includes exemplar poems to use right away or to guide you in weaving favorite poems into your lesson planning provides examples of student work from classrooms where poetry has been used successfully as a vehicle for learning. You might think you don't have room in your standards-based curriculum to teach with poems, but with applications to content standards woven throughout, Practical Poetry will prove that you do. Take Sara Holbrook's advice. You'll energize your students, reinforce their topical understanding over a variety of content-area standards, and build their critical-thinking and language skills. Poetry has never been so practical.

    "The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable." Since Wilde's condemnation of modern biography, the genre would appear to have accelerated its descent into bad taste. As Carl Rollyson points out, writers as various as Rebecca West, Ted Hughes, and Joyce Carol Oates have deplored biographers' tendency to cut up lives and render the bloody data so as to make their subjects seem unhealthy, unwholesome, and unsound. Janet Malcolm has compared biographers to burglars; modern novels feature the biographer as grave robber and victimizer. Exactly when did biography take this turn for the worse? Inquiring into the history of the art, and examining his own practices as well as those of biographers from Samuel Johnson to Richard Ellmann, Jeffrey Meyers, and many others, Mr. Rollyson casts considerable doubt on the indictments handed down by Oates, Malcolm and Co. By its very nature, Mr. Rollyson argues, biography is a problematic and controversial genre. That contemporary critics believe it has gone astray only reveals their ignorance of history and their hostility to the biographical enterprise itself--an animosity born of a misguided modernism and a rejection of Enlightenment values. A Higher Form of Cannibalism? explores the nexus between scholarship and biography, and demonstrates how the similarities of method between Leon Edel and Kitty Kelley outweigh the differences. Viewed through the prism of biography, the scholarly and the popular may not be as clearly separated as people suppose.

    Here the writers describe their diverse backgrounds and experiences and share with you the techniques they used to create, develop and market their successful manuscripts.

    

    It includes detailed lists of available resources and explains general research methods and proper citation of sources. An invaluable reference, this book helps researchers make use of the many new resources available today. It is divided into four easy-to-use sections: Researching Your Topic contains a step-by-step guide to the process of doing research, with information on developing a subject and planning research, gathering information, and evaluating sources; Finding Sources of Information explains how to find, access, and use a number of different sources, from archival collections and biographical indexes to government agencies and newspapers, from online and electronic services to radio and television; Finding Sources by Subject contains lists of important research sources categorized by subject matter;

    With its step-by step approach, this text is appropriate for readers of all experience levels. KEY TOPICS: Basic format and style, the elements of a screenplay, advanced format and style, special format situations, and common screenplay mistakes. MARKET: Introductory screenwriting.

    I absolutely agree, and I'm sure most successful writers would echo my sentiments: Inspiration is the easy part. Over the years I have spoken with and taught beginning writers from all around the world, in all sorts of settings. I have helped them review, edit, and rewrite their work, and have found one common thread among those would-be writers who eventually become published authors: They are willing to devote themselves to the not-so-easy part of writing--the 90 percent perspiration. As I worked with these many writers I discovered what I consider to be the simplest and most practical writing method available--the train-of-thought method. This excellent, well known writing method did not originate with me, but it seems no one had ever taken the time to put the method in book form; I therefore decided to do so myself. This not a book about proper grammar or punctuation, or how best to choose the voice or set the scene for your great American novel. There are already countless books covering those subjects, if that's what you're looking for. But if you want to know how best to take your thoughts and dreams and put them into a clear, compelling, readable manuscript, then this is the book for you. Having personally seen the train-of-thought writing method help so many new writers learn to organize, write, and polish their ideas into successful manuscripts, I offer this book to those who would do the same. May it direct and encourage you as you enter into the 90 percent perspiration phase of your writing career--the serious phase through which true writers are formed.

    Subjects covered include managing suppliers and customers, hiring and firing staff, debt collection, credit control and more.An invaluable source of 198 drafted, annotated business letters and emails covering a wide range of business situations... so you'll never again have to sit in front of your PC wondering how you should word a letter about a business agreement, write a business email or how to word a business proposal.Business letters and emails can really help oil the wheels of commerce. But writing business letters and business e-mails can take so long, as you carefully word each paragraph.Why bother? Business Letters & Emails Made Easy provides your business with ready-made business letter templates and business e-mail templates that you can quickly adapt for every conceivable business situation. Business areas covered in this guide include: Business letters and e-mail templates for managing suppliers Business letters and email templates for managing customers Business letters and e-mail templates for sales and marketing management Business letters and email templates for debt collection and credit control Business letters and e-mail templates for hiring and firing staff Business letters and email templates for banking, insurance and property Business and the community That's 198 business letters and email templates waiting for you. Go on: take away the headache and time-wasting of business letter writing and e-mail writing. When a typical business letter can cost a business approximately £15 to send out, mostly in the time of the manager composing it, anything that can bring the cost down will make a big difference.Business Letters & E-mails Made Easy will save you time and money. All the template business letter and email templates in this book mean you can simply adapt and fire off your business letters or e-mails in no time at all. Each business letter and email is accompanied by a useful commentary, explaining when to use a particular business letter/e-mail template and helping you choose exactly the right turn of phrase for maximum effect or complete clarity. Business Letters & Emails Made Easy: Because its the 'ends' your business should be concentrating on, not the mere 'means'.

    With specific attention paid to intellectual property, contractual electronic rights, reclaiming copyright, fair use, permissions, work-for-hire, public domain, textual referrals, and trademarks, this resource provides information necessary for those looking to sell and protect their work. The most recent changes in copyright and trademark laws as well as pending and new legislation affecting writers are also covered. The appendix includes contract, copyright, and trademark forms commonly used by authors, which are also available in a PDF format on the accompanying CD-ROM.

    Every actor can find a sitcom niche by identifying with one of these eight characters. Using past and current actors and sitcom personalities, Sedita describes in detail where these characters come from and how actors can play them truthfully. * who is normally cast as The Logical Smart One' * why do we love The Lovable Loser' * why is The Neurotic such a fun character to play' In addition, readers learn how to break down a comedy script, how to identify different types of jokes, how to deliver them with comedic precision, sitcom auditioning techniques, and how to market themselves.

    Artfully designed, the kit offers 20 "retreats," each with a theme and suggested activities aimed at maximizing creativity. Based on the author's experiences as a writing teacher and workshop leader, The Writer's Retreat Kit encourages creativity in a wide range of environments - from writing during business travel to sojourns in Walden Pond-like wilderness to adventures in the backyard, and from observation at international airports to international coffee at the local café . Each retreat contains exercises and tips to get writers and artists started and keep them going. And since writing isn't the only activity that occurs during a retreat, each theme offers other "Provisions, Practices, and Creative Nourishment" ideas that stimulate both the writer and the writing: books that echo the theme, art projects to fulfill other creative urges, music suggestions, and even recipes. With inspiring artwork and quotes, this kit is a veritable muse for individuals as well as writing groups.

    It is a reference book that allows the user to quickly obtain the answer to many commonly encountered writing questions concerning the following subjects: sentence and paragraph drafting, word selection and usage, spelling, numbers, grammar, punctuation, legal citation, legal correspondence, legal research memoranda, and court briefs. It also includes a chapter on the location of various non fee-based internet and other computer based legal research sources. In addition is a chapter discussing the various time deadlines under federal rules of civil and criminal procedure. The book is color coded so information may be easily located and designed to lie flat on a desk next to a computer. It is written in a non technical manner and designed so that it is easy to understand and use by anyone working in a law office. It includes checklist for use in conjunction with the various types of legal writing.

    Now writers seeking ideas and motivation can take advantage of these ancient predictions, recast by Sarah Jane Sloane into relevant suggestions for contemporary writers. Each of the I Ching's 64 hexagrams, interpreted by Sloane from years of study as well as from comparisons of over fifty translations, offers commentary and direction for what the future will hold for the writer. In addition to this oracular system of advice, the book outlines the five stages of the writing process — brainstorming, planning, generating a first draft, revising the draft, and polishing — and provides a clear introduction to the philosophy of the I Ching. Inspirational quotations, writing prompts, solutions to common writing problems, and a wonderful exploration of the creative process are also included.

    In proposing a new form of writing he calls "craft criticism," Mayers, himself a compositionist and creative writer, explores the connections between creative writing and composition studies programs, which currently exist as separate fields within the larger and more amorphous field of English studies. If creative writing and composition studies are brought together in productive dialogue, they can, in his view, succeed in inverting the common hierarchy in English departments that privileges interpretation of literature over the teaching of writing.

    A great idea. Now what? Whether you dream of having your name on the cover of a successful book (and 81% of Americans believe they have a book in them), or you're a seasoned yet frustrated veteran of the publishing jungle, this nuts-and-bolts guide demystifies every aspect of the publishing process. Husband-and-wife team Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, who developed the enormously popular Putting Your Passion into Print seminar at Stanford University, are known to their students as "the Click and Clack of publishing." Whether the thought is large (how does one deal with rejection) or small (why is it that a "special pen" works such magic), they cover all the bases. How to: Choose a top-of-the-heap idea;Come up with a blockbuster title; Craft an attention-getting pitch; Create a selling proposal; Find the right agent, publisher and editor; Understand a book contract and royalty statements; Enhance presentation skills; Develop sales, marketing, and publicity savvy; and, if necessary, self-publish (as did Irma Rombauer for The Joy of Cooking and James Redfield for The Celestine Prophesy). No matter if you're a literary fiction writer, a romance novelist, an academic looking to reach a popular audience, or a memoirist wanting to publish your life story, Putting Your Passion to Printshares a wealth of experience and insight from people who've been there and done that. Includes interviews with hundreds of publishing insiders—agents, editors, authors, and booksellers; side boxes featuring real-life publishing success stories; sample proposals, query letters, a resource guide, and more."

    It explains how to succeed in every area affecting a writer's livelihood, from submissions and permissions to royalties and taxes.

    Topics include: Network relationships with affiliates, the expanded market of syndication, sources of programming for stations and networks, research and its role in programming decisions, fundamental appeals to an audience and what qualities are tied to success, outside forces that influence programming, strategies for launching new programs or saving old ones. Includes real-life examples taken from the authors' experiences, and 250+ illustrations!