Did you ever wish you could tell a story that leaves others spellbound? Storytelling teacher and champion Margot Leitman will show you how! With a fun, irreverent, and infographic approach, this guide breaks a story into concrete components with ways to improve content, structure, emotional impact, and delivery through personal anecdotes, relatable examples, and practical exercises.

    Including Felicia’s personal stories and hard-won wisdom, Embrace Your Weird offers: —Entertaining and revelatory exercises that empower you to be fearless, so you can rediscover the things that bring you joy, and crack your imagination wide open —Unique techniques to vanquish enemies of creativity like: anxiety, fear, procrastination, perfectionism, criticism, and jealousy —Tips to cultivate a creative community —Space to explore and get your neurons firing Whether you enjoy writing, baking, painting, podcasting, playing music, or have yet to uncover your favorite creative outlet, Embrace Your Weird will help you unlock the power of self-expression. Get motivated. Get creative. Get weird.

    Showing how any reader can gain more pleasure from poetry, it looks at the ways in which poetry interacts with the language we use in our everyday lives and explores how poems use language and form to create meaning.Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Carol Ann Duffy, and from around the English-speaking world, it looks at aspects including:how technical aspects such as rhythm and measures work how different tones of voice affect a poem how poetic language relates to everyday language how different types of poetry work, from sonnets to free verse how the form and 'space' of a poem contributes to its meaning.Poetry: The Basics is an invaluable and easy to read guide for anyone wanting to get to grips with reading and writing poetry.

    If its purpose is to entertain or to provoke thought, it makes readers want to come back for more.Revised and updated, this guide covers four essential aspects of good writing:Individual words - spelling variations, hyphenation, frequently confused homonyms, frequently misused words and phrases, irregular plurals and negatives, and uses of capitalization and type style to add special meaningsPunctuation - the role of each mark in achieving clarity and affecting tone, and demonstration of how misuses can lead to ambiguitySyntax and structure - agreement of subject and verb, parallel construction, modifiers, tenses, pronouns, active versus passive voice, and moreStyle - advice on the less hard-and-fast areas of clarity and tone, including sentence length and order, conciseness, simplification, reading level, jargon and cliches, and subtletyFilled with self-test exercises and whimsical literary quotations, "Grammatically Correct" steers clear of academic stuffiness, focusing instead on practical strategies and intuitive explanations.Discussions are designed to get to the heart of a concept and provide a sufficient sense of when and how to use it, along with examples that show what ambiguities or misinterpretations might result if the rules are not followed. In cases where there is more than one acceptable way to do something, the approach is not to prescribe one over another but simply to describe the options.Readers of this book will never break the rules of language again - unintentionally."

    Written by America’s most distinguished editors, these 38 essays will teach, inform, and inspire anyone interested in the world of editing. Editors on Editing includes essays on the evolution of the American editor; the ethical and moral dimensions of editing; what an editor looks for in a query letter, proposal, and manuscript; line editing; copyediting; the freelance editor; the question of political correctness; making the most of writers’ conferences; and numerous other topics

    Although the structure of the parent volume has been preserved so that reference to it can easily be made, this grammar has been especially written to take into account the needs of advanced students of grammar in colleges and universities.

    In this new edition, new studies have been incorporated and the evaluation sections in each chapter have been expanded, ensuring that the book remains as fresh, engaging and useful as the day it was first published.

    The co mpanion will interest tourists, students and business travel lers to Japan. '

    This is a fresh interpretation of the ancient canons of composing: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. It shows that rhetoric, as it was practiced and taught by the ancients, was an intrinsic part of daily life and of communal discourse about current events. This book gives special emphasis to classic strategies of invention, devoting separate chapters to stasis theory, common and special topics, formal topics, ethos, pathos, extrinsic proofs, and Aristotelian means of reasoning. The authors' engaging discussion and their many contemporary examples of ancient rhetorical principles present rhetoric as a set of flexible, situational practices. This practical history draws the most relevant and useful concepts from ancient rhetorics and discusses, updates, and offers them for use in the contemporary composition classroom.

    It is democratic, everchanging and ingenious in its assimilation of other cultures. English runs through the heart of the world of finance, medicine and the Internet, and it is understood by around two thousand million people across the world. It seems set to go on. Yet it was nearly wiped out in its early years.Embracing elements of Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi and Gullah, this 1500-year story covers a huge range of countries and people. The Adventure of English is not only an enthralling story of power, religion and trade, but also the story of people, and how their day-to-day lives shaped and continue to change the extraordinary language that is English.

    But linguist Daniel Everett argues that, like other tools, language was invented by humans and can be reinvented or lost. He shows how the evolution of different language forms—that is, different grammar—reflects how language is influenced by human societies and experiences, and how it expresses their great variety.  For example, the Amazonian Pirahã put words together in ways that violate our long-held under-standing of how language works, and Pirahã grammar expresses complex ideas very differently than English grammar does. Drawing on the Wari’ language of Brazil, Everett explains that speakers of all languages, in constructing their stories, omit things that all members of the culture understand. In addition, Everett discusses how some cultures can get by without words for numbers or counting, without verbs for “to say” or “to give,” illustrating how the very nature of what’s important in a language is culturally determined. Combining anthropology, primatology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and his own pioneering—and adventurous—research with the Amazonian Pirahã, and using insights from many different languages and cultures, Everett gives us an unprecedented elucidation of this society-defined nature of language. In doing so, he also gives us a new understanding of how we think and who we are.

    Macrone is an erudite guide.--San Francisco Chronicle. 40 illustrations.

    This series has three preparation courses, Academic Reading, Academic Writing, and Listening and Speaking. The courses develop language, skills and test techniques to help students achieve a higher IELTS score.

    Thematically covering every subject imaginable, from God to dogs, this collection is the seminal gathering of our national wit and a picture of who we are as a nation - a monument to our monumental silliness.'An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.' George MikesJane Austen, Jo Brand, Craig Brown, Winston Churchill, Alan Clark, Jeremy Clarkson, Billy Connolly, Peter Cook, Tommy Cooper, Stephen Fry, A.A. Gill, Boris Johnson, Samuel Johnson, Maureen Lipman, Spike Milligan, Eric Morecambe, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Frank Skinner, Sue Townsend, Peter Ustinov, Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, Victoria Wood and many more.

    Fully updated, this comprehensive resource now features more than 100 sample letters and manuscript pages, expanded instruction for electronic submissions, updated formatting and submitting guidelines, and new insider tips from top agents and editors.With strong and weak sample query letters, novel synopses, articles, nonfiction book proposals, manuscript pages, scripts, and more, you'll see exactly what works and what doesn't. Plus, each sample page features individual callouts to clearly identify and explain critical elements so that you don't miss a thing.With this all-encompassing guide, you'll discover everything you need to make your work look professional, polished, and publishable.