|
Showing 1 - 6 of
6 matches in All Departments
An essential guide to cultivating joy in your professional and
personal writing Writing should be a pleasurable challenge, not a
painful chore. Writing with Pleasure empowers academic,
professional, and creative writers to reframe their negative
emotions about writing and reclaim their positive ones. By learning
how to cast light on the shadows, you will soon find yourself
bringing passion and pleasure to everything you write. Acclaimed
international writing expert Helen Sword invites you to step into
your "WriteSPACE"-a space of pleasurable writing that is socially
balanced, physically engaged, aesthetically nourishing, creatively
challenging, and emotionally uplifting. Sword weaves together
cutting-edge findings in the sciences and social sciences with
compelling narratives gathered from nearly six hundred faculty
members and graduate students from across the disciplines and
around the world. She provides research-based principles, hands-on
strategies, and creative "pleasure prompts" designed to help you
ramp up your productivity and enhance the personal rewards of your
writing practice. Whether you're writing a scholarly article, an
administrative email, or a love letter, this book will inspire you
to find delight in even the most mundane writing tasks and a
richer, deeper pleasure in those you already enjoy. Exuberantly
illustrated by prizewinning graphic memoirist Selina Tusitala
Marsh, Writing with Pleasure is an indispensable resource for
academics, students, professionals, and anyone for whom writing has
come to feel like a burden rather than a joy.
Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen
Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars
frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who
want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where to begin,
here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to
make articles and books a pleasure to read-and to write. Dispelling
the myth that you cannot get published without writing wordy,
impersonal prose, Sword shows how much journal editors and readers
welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Sword's
analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a
wide range of fields documents a startling gap between how
academics typically describe good writing and the turgid prose they
regularly produce. Stylish Academic Writing showcases a range of
scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who
write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up
specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter
openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable
techniques that any writer can master.
Do your sentences sag? Could your paragraphs use a pick-me-up? If
so, The Writer's Diet is for you! It's a short, sharp introduction
to great writing that will help you energize your prose and boost
your verbal fitness. Helen Sword dispenses with excessive
explanations and overwrought analysis. Instead, she offers an
easy-to-follow set of writing principles: use active verbs whenever
possible; favor concrete language over vague abstractions; avoid
long strings of prepositional phrases; employ adjectives and
adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a
sentence; and reduce your dependence on four pernicious "waste
words" it, this, that, and there. Sword then shows the rules in
action through examples from William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson,
Martin Luther King Jr., John McPhee, A. S. Byatt, Richard Dawkins,
Alison Gopnik, and many more. A writing fitness test encourages you
to assess your own writing and get immediate advice on addressing
problem areas. While The Writer's Diet is as sleek and concise as
the writing ideals contained within, this slim volume packs a
powerful punch. With Sword's coaching writers of all levels can
strengthen and tone their sentences with the stroke of a pen or the
click of a mouse. As with any fitness routine, adhering to the
rules requires energy and vigilance. The results, however, will
speak for themselves.
From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new
guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take
greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed one
hundred academics worldwide about their writing background and
practices. Relatively few were trained as writers, she found, and
yet all have developed strategies to thrive in their
publish-or-perish environment. So how do these successful academics
write, and where do they find the "air and light and time and
space," in the words of poet Charles Bukowski, to get their writing
done? What are their formative experiences, their daily routines,
their habits of mind? How do they summon up the courage to take
intellectual risks and the resilience to deal with rejection? Sword
identifies four cornerstones that anchor any successful writing
practice: Behavioral habits of discipline and persistence;
Artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care; Social habits of
collegiality and collaboration; and Emotional habits of positivity
and pleasure. Building on this "BASE," she illuminates the
emotional complexity of the writing process and exposes the lack of
writing support typically available to early-career academics. She
also lays to rest the myth that academics must produce safe,
conventional prose or risk professional failure. The successful
writers profiled here tell stories of intellectual passions
indulged, disciplinary conventions subverted, and risk-taking
rewarded. Grounded in empirical research and focused on sustainable
change, Air & Light & Time & Space offers a
customizable blueprint for refreshing personal habits and creating
a collegial environment where all writers can flourish.
Spiritualism is often dismissed by literary critics and historians
as merely a Victorian fad. Helen Sword demonstrates that it
continued to flourish well into the twentieth century and seeks to
explain why. Literary modernism, she maintains, is replete with
ghosts and spirits. In Ghostwriting Modernism she explores
spiritualism's striking persistence and what she calls "the vexed
relationship between mediumistic discourse and modernist literary
aesthetics."Sword begins with a brief historical review of popular
spiritualism's roots in nineteenth-century literary culture. In
subsequent chapters, she discusses the forms of mediumship most
closely allied with writing, the forms of writing most closely
allied with mediumship, and the thematic and aesthetic alliances
between popular spiritualism and modernist literature. Finally, she
accounts for the recent proliferation of a spiritualist-influenced
vocabulary (ghostliness, hauntings, the uncanny) in the works of
historians, sociologists, philosophers, and especially literary
critics and theorists.Documenting the hitherto unexplored
relationship between spiritualism and modern authors (some
credulous, some skeptical), Sword offers compelling readings of
works by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H.D., James
Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. Even as modernists mock
spiritualism's ludicrous lingo and deride its metaphysical
excesses, she finds, they are intrigued and attracted by its
ontological shiftiness, its blurring of the traditional divide
between high culture and low culture, and its self-serving tendency
to favor form over content (medium, so to speak, over message).
Like modernism itself, Sword asserts, spiritualism embraces rather
than eschews paradox, providing an ideological space where
conservative beliefs can coexist with radical, even iconoclastic,
thought and action.
Spiritualism is often dismissed by literary critics and historians
as merely a Victorian fad. Helen Sword demonstrates that it
continued to flourish well into the twentieth century and seeks to
explain why. Literary modernism, she maintains, is replete with
ghosts and spirits. In Ghostwriting Modernism she explores
spiritualism's striking persistence and what she calls "the vexed
relationship between mediumistic discourse and modernist literary
aesthetics."Sword begins with a brief historical review of popular
spiritualism's roots in nineteenth-century literary culture. In
subsequent chapters, she discusses the forms of mediumship most
closely allied with writing, the forms of writing most closely
allied with mediumship, and the thematic and aesthetic alliances
between popular spiritualism and modernist literature. Finally, she
accounts for the recent proliferation of a spiritualist-influenced
vocabulary (ghostliness, hauntings, the uncanny) in the works of
historians, sociologists, philosophers, and especially literary
critics and theorists.Documenting the hitherto unexplored
relationship between spiritualism and modern authors (some
credulous, some skeptical), Sword offers compelling readings of
works by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H.D., James
Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. Even as modernists mock
spiritualism's ludicrous lingo and deride its metaphysical
excesses, she finds, they are intrigued and attracted by its
ontological shiftiness, its blurring of the traditional divide
between high culture and low culture, and its self-serving tendency
to favor form over content (medium, so to speak, over message).
Like modernism itself, Sword asserts, spiritualism embraces rather
than eschews paradox, providing an ideological space where
conservative beliefs can coexist with radical, even iconoclastic,
thought and action.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|