Writing

Writing Skills

Joanne Buckley's Fit to Print (Seventh edition, 2009) is an excellent guide to essay writing. It usefully describes the "Literary Essay" in some detail.

However, two books stand out for me as both instructive and inspiring. The first is William Zinsser's On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, now in its Thirtieth Year Anniversary Edition, 2006. I've been a fan of Zinsser's book for a long time. His chapter "Bits and Pieces," like Stephen King's "Toolbox" chapter below, is one of the best pieces of advice ever crafted by one writer to another. Read his talk to incoming international students at the Columbia School of Journalism, August 11, 2009:

Writing Good English: A talk by William Zinsser to foreign students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism | The American Scholar

Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) is fascinating in a different way. Even though his target audience is the creative writer, King's "Toolbox" section, indebted to Strunk & White's Elements of Style, offers good advice.

Both books advocate a style that is simple and direct.

Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Profile Books, 2003) is also good fun. I didn't read it when it first came out. I chanced upon it in a charity shop in Wales in the summer of 2010 and paid a couple of dollars for it. She's worth reading for her passionate and amusing defense of the written word and her acute observations on the impact that the electronic word is having on our ability to communicate clearly. Once upon a time we typed with all our fingers: now we are reduced to texting with our thumbs.

The Acadia University department of English grammar page: http://english.acadiau.ca/Grammar/index.htm and the excellent Acadia University Writing Centre: http://writingcentre.acadiau.ca/ offer useful help.