The Writer's Diet: Paperback

(Paperback)

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Description

This bestselling handbook will highlight your bad writing habits and sharpen your style - for clearer, crisper sentences and punchier prose. Is your writing flabby or fit If your sentences are weighed down with passives and prepositions, be-verbs and waste words, The Writer's Diet is for you. This book will help you energise your writing and strip unnecessary padding from your prose. The Writer's Diet offers a short, sharp introduction to great writing. Through the online test at www.writersdiet.com and the analysis and examples in this book, Helen Sword teaches writers of all kinds - students to teachers, lawyers to librarians - how to transform flabby sentences into active, energetic prose. The book and the website enable writers to diagnose their writing for flab - passives and prepositions, weak verbs and waste words - and energise their work by stripping away unnecessary padding. The rules of good writing are deceptively simple but this book helps writers to see those principles at work, through examples by stylish authors from Charles Dickens to John McPhee. First published in 2007, The Writer's Diet became a bestselling handbook and now returns refreshed alongside a new version of www.writersdiet.com. The book will highlight your bad habits and sharpen your style - for clearer, crisper sentences filled with words that count.

Author Bio

Professor Helen Sword is a literary scholar and director of the Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland. She is a scholar, poet, and award-winning teacher who has published widely on literature, higher education and academic writing. Her books include Engendering Inspiration (Michigan 1995), Ghostwriting Modernism (Cornell 2002), The Writer's Diet (Pearson Education 2007), Pacific Rim Modernisms (Toronto, co-edited 2009), and Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard 2012). Her TedEd talk on Zombie Nouns has been viewed 180,000 times (http://www.youtube.com/watchv=dNlkHtMgcPQ) and promoted by Steven Pinker and others. She regularly gives seminars and teaches writing at universities around the world.