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Anyone want to post a tldr?
as a paid author, given the title, i was hoping for an article that touched on drinking, lallygagging, and partying --- then getting all your work done in one day at the end of the month.
Being a writer is easy: (1) hire a good editor, (2) remix existing stories (3) be famous.
Use "The Elements Style" by Strunk & White.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconded. Fantastic. And I'd also recommend "On Writing" by Stephen King.
I was just telling a friend how important this book is in highlighting the nuts and bolts of writing in that it's a lot like building stuff. We tend to romanticize the writer as having ideas come to them with hot cocoa and a NYT bestseller literally pouring from their fingertips, but the reality is a lot closer to grinding at an especially punishing task. Mr. King highlights it wonderfully, and even if you're not a f…
But there is a game! It's called Write On Par. It teaches concise writing, playfully. Because no writer has the patience to sit through a grammar class...and no reader wants to read wordy, confusing writing no matter what the topic. http://writeonpar.com /shameless plug Beautiful article though. I've met a couple recently-turned full-time authors and have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for the author/a…
It repeatedly returns: “Your response seems incomplete, so we set your score to the length of the original sentence. If we're mistaken, please drop us a line with a screenshot of this screen”, without any indication of how to fix the solution to be acceptable. I suppose it’s fishing for some specific keywords?
It doesn’t seem to have any full natural language model or conceptual model of the idea of the paragraph, so it can’t point out awkward or confusing phrases.
The proposed “par” and “record” sentences are not especially clear or elegant prose, or even especially short for conveying the ideas in the paragraph, and the metric (fewest characters used) is in general a weak heuristic for clear writing. The prompts don’t offer any list of essential vs. superfluous information, or even an explanation of the paragraph’s context and audience, so a proofreader/rewriter has to guess precisely what the author needed to say, and what the appropriate tone/style is.
I ultimately don’t understand how this game teaches writing any better than just trying to rewrite random sentences found in a book. Or for that matter, just having an email conversation with a friend about some random topic.
* Writers who make a living writing
* Writers who don't (yet)
* Fiction writers: Novelists and short-story writers
* Poets
* Journalists: reporters, war correspondents, editors
* Bloggers
* Corporate: Technical writers, Marketing copy writers, etc.
* Academics all stripes
These categories aren't mutually exclusive, but they each represent a different type of writing, which itself requires a different practice, approach or method.
There are, in fact, many handbooks for being a writer, and almost all of them are written to serve a particular type of writer and not others.
The creative writing departments of America have produced piles of writing about writing (about writing -- gaah ... self-referential recursion! No one escapes a medium describing itself.).
Some of the classics are:
* The Elements of Style - Strunk and White
* Politics and the English Language - Orwell https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
* Hemingway on Writing https://www.scribd.com/doc/156100470/Ernest-Hemingway-on-Wri...
* Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style - Erasmus (the opposite of Strunk...)
* And so on...
The best handbook of all, though is simply the study of great writers whose work you love, as the author points out. Anyone serious about fiction or prose should dive into the 19th-century Russian and French novelists, Virginia Woolf, an annotated Shakespeare, etc. It's all there just waiting for us. In that sense, every piece of good writing is a handbook on writing.
(Fwiw, I made a living as a reporter and editor for about 10 years.)
https://books.google.com/books/about/If_You_Want_to_Write.ht...
Another nice one is Stein on Writing
https://books.google.com/books/about/Stein_On_Writing.html?i...
Of course, what most writers will advise is that you just write a lot, and get good writers to critique your work. Writing, like most arts, takes years and years.
Today, there are various web sites that will "crowd-source" critiques of your writing, in exchange for your critiquing other people's work (also good practice). I've used critters.org quite a bit but there are several other big ones these days.
People mean different things when they say "writer," and it's worthwhile untangling a few different types. * Writers who make a living writing * Writers who don't (yet) * Fiction writers: Novelists and short-story writers * Poets * Journalists: reporters, war correspondents, editors * Bloggers * Corporate: Technical writers, Marketing copy writers, etc. * Academics all stripes These categories aren't mutually exclusi…
* Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Joseph Bizup
* The Chicago Manual of Style (depending on what kind of writer you are, a different guide may suit you better)
* Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
* On Writing, Stephen King