Several short sentences about writing
Most of what you think you know about writing is useless. It's the harmful debris of your education'a mixture of half-truths, myths, and false assumptions that prevents you from writing well. Drawing on years of experience as a writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg offers an approach to writing that will change the way you work and think. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. What you'll find here isn't the way to write. Instead, you'll find a way to clear your mind of illusions about writing and discover how you write. Several Short Sentences About Writing is a book of first steps and experiments. They will revolutionize the way you think and perceive, and they will change forever the sense of your own authority as a writer. This is a book full of learning, but it's also a book full of unlearning'a way to recover the vivid, rhythmic, poetic sense of language you once possessed. An indispensable and unique book that will give you a clear understanding of how to think about what you do when you write and how to improve the quality of your writing.
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4recommend
5mentions
4people
2018–2025years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Read the following books:
- On Writing Well by William Zissner
- Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg
- The Elements of Style, 4th Edition by Strunk & White
- Good Prose by Kidder & Todd
- Wordcraft by Jack Hart
- Storycraft by Jack Hart
- The Art and Craft of Feature Writing by William Blundell
- The Art and Craft of Storytelling by Nancy Lamb
- Elsewhere, https://sive.rs/book/ShortSentences, Sivers recommends "Several Short Sentences About Writing", which is a perspective on writing that I'd not seen before. A useful read if you want to practice his present advice.
- There's a wonderful book entitled Several Short Sentences About Writing from Verlyn Klinkenborg that I feel is important to everyone who enjoys reading and writing. It's about learning to free your mind when writing (don't try to stick to strict rules, find your own voice in writing). Reading that book also helped me learn how to clear my mind of bias when reading an essay such as this. And I did enjoy this. Not because I understood where he was from or where he's been. Just the opposite: I don't understand and cannot comprehend living his east St. Louis life, his NBA life, or his post-career depression. I enjoyed it because the style of writing fit the story being told.
- Deep C Secrets 50 Effective C++ tips Design patterns Elements of ReUsable OO software Several short sentences about writing The official Ted guide to speaking
- > More and more, the sentences I had in my head were like the sentences I loved in books: they began in one place and ended somewhere you hadn’t imagined them going, though, at each turn, idea seemed to follow idea perfectly naturally. The surprise at the end, as the thought completed itself, seemed wildly exciting: the whole sentence needed to be reëxperienced in this light; waves of unexpected revelations and insights resulted.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of Several Short Sentences About Writing, calls these “volunteer sentences.” You don’t follow them, you tame them. Take control of your writing.
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