Writing To The Point

Explains how to write simply and directly, describes the basics of organization, and briefly reviews grammar and punctuation

The classic work of writing instruction back in print! The complete, concise guide to writing fiction that sells from one of the most popular instructors of the Writers of the Future and Clarion workshops.Get a master's competitive edge in the writing business. Bestselling writer, editor and renowned writing teacher Algis Budrys, known as "AJ" to his many students, has distilled his fifty years of success into Writing to the Point. Write better stories. Fix mistakes in your current stories. Writing to the Point contains all the writing articles that appeared in the classic tomorrow Magazine, re-edited and expanded. Algis Budrys has taught hundreds of people at scores of workshops, was a well-known critic, editor, and author in his own right. "AJ's information is, and always has been, solid gold. Every writer can learn from this book."-New York Times bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson

Complete concise guide to writing fiction that sells.Get a master's competitive edge in the writing business. Bestselling writer, editor and renown writing teacher Algis Budrys has distilled 50 years of success into "Writing to the Point."This is the book you need to be a better, and more successful, author.Write better stories. Fix mistakes in your present stories!Algis Budrys's Writing to The Point contains all the writing articles that appeared over the first ten issues of tomorrow Magazine, re-edited and expanded. It has an introduction by the author, and an appendix containing three separate essays: "Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy""Ideas, How They Work And How To Fix Them""What a Story Is."In this book you will find, in permanent form, everything an aspiring amateur needs to know in order to become a published author. Algis Budrys has taught hundreds of people at scores of workshops, and edited not only tomorrow Magazine but many books and other magazines. The methods he describes in Writing to The Point are methods that have worked repeatedly.

Mila has an exceptional talent for reading a room--sensing hidden facts and unspoken emotions from clues that others overlook... So when her father's best friend, Matthew, goes missing from his upstate New York home, Mila and her beloved father travel from London to find him. She collects information about Matthew from his belongings, from his wife and baby, from the dog he left behind and from the ghosts of his past--slowly piecing together the story everyone else has missed. But just when she's closest to solving the mystery, a shocking betrayal calls into question her trust in the one person she thought she could read best.

Good writers follow the rules. Great writers know the rules—and follow their instincts! Finding the right words, in the right order, matters—whether you’re a student embarking on an essay, a job applicant drafting your cover letter, an employee composing an email . . . even a (hopeful) lover writing a text. Do it wrong and you just might get an F, miss the interview, lose a client, or spoil your chance at a second date. Do it right, and the world is yours. In Write to the Point, accomplished author and literary critic Sam Leith kicks the age-old lists of dos and don’ts to the curb. Yes, he covers the nuts and bolts we need to be in complete command of the language: grammar, punctuation, parts of speech, and other subjects half-remembered from grade school. But more importantly, he charts a commonsense course between the “Armies of Correctness” and the “Descriptivist Irregulars.” For Leith, knowing not just the rules but also how and when to ignore them—developing an ear for what works best in context—is everything. In this master class, Leith teaches us a skill of paramount importance in this smartphone age, when we all carry a keyboard in our pockets: to write clearly and persuasively for any purpose—to write to the point.

The essential guide to writing succinctly. Who doesn’t hate wading through wordy paragraphs? Unfortunately, many writers don’t realize when they are padding their sentences and obscuring their meaning. Enter To the Point, the essential guide to writing succinctly. Featuring hundreds of new entries, this freshly updated edition is complete with: • A guide to the basics of writing concisely, including how to reduce the number of words in a phrase, substitute a single word for a phrase, and delete extraneous words and phrases. • The "Dictionary of Concise Writing," which gives concise alternatives to thousands of wordy phrases. Language expert Robert Hartwell Fiske uses each wordy phrase in a sentence and then rewrites or deletes the phrase entirely to show how the sentence can be improved. • The brand new "Guide to Obfuscation: A Reverse Dictionary," which helps writers build a more pithy vocabulary. To the Point is the perfect reference book for anyone who wants to communicate more effectively through clear and beautiful writing.

With more than a hundred published novels and more than seventeen million copies of his books in print, USA Today bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith knows how to outline. And he knows how to write a novel without an outline. In this WMG Writer's Guide, Dean takes you step-by-step through the process of writing without an outline and explains why not having an outline boosts your creative voice and keeps you more interested in your writing. Want to enjoy your writing more and entertain yourself? Then toss away your outline and Write into the Dark.

An unforgettably exuberant and potent novel by a writer at the height of her powers Two auditors for the U.S. egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night—an entire egg farm’s worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland—a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits—assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues. Deb Olin Unferth’s wildly inventive novel is a heist story of a very unusual sort. Swirling with a rich array of voices, Barn 8 takes readers into the minds of these renegades: a farmer’s daughter, a former director of undercover investigations, hundreds of activists, a forest ranger who suddenly comes upon forty thousand hens, and a security guard who is left on an empty farm for years. There are glimpses twenty thousand years into the future to see what chickens might evolve into on our contaminated planet. We hear what hens think happens when they die. In the end the cracked hearts of these indelible characters, their earnest efforts to heal themselves, and their radical actions will lead them to ruin or revelation. Funny, whimsical, philosophical, and heartbreaking, Barn 8 ultimately asks: What constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of change? Unferth comes at this question with striking ingenuity, razor-sharp wit, and ferocious passion. Barn 8 is a rare comic-political drama, a tour de force for our time.

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