Writing With Style, a writing guide packed with helpful hints for the student writer, receives a fresh, new cover design for Fall 2002.
What makes some writers stand out from the pack? How can students make their papers more interesting and get better grades at the same time? This book uses the writing of real kids to show you how *Organize ideas before writing *Choose grammatically correct word combinations *Arrange sentences for maximum effect *Create punchy paragraphs *Polish a presentation to look its very best *Proofread for mistakes
Planning. In this section, Ms. Young emphasizes the helpfulness of purposeful planning. She encourages aspiring authors to carefully craft their writing experience from the surrounding elements to the subject matter. Do you work better indoors or outdoors? On paper or a computer? Surrounded by distractions or in a clean, sterile environment? If you don’t already know the answers to these questions, then try experimenting with different scenarios to see which one is best for you.
When it comes to your actual project, don’t mistreat it. Pick your topic ahead of time and spend some time thinking through it. Next, write an outline: this will help you to further categorize your thoughts and will make the actual writing much easier.
Producing. In this section, by far the longest of the book, Ms. Young provides helpful hints and tips for the writing process as well as solid grammatical advice. She encourages writers to have a clear understanding of the style of their genre, to maintain clarity of meaning and precision at all costs, to preserve an active rather than passive tone, and to avoid droning. This is a very, very practical section.
Polishing. This section emphasizes the importance of fine-tuning your work – rewriting boring or unclear sections, revising sentences to maintain parallel verb usage, including a variety of sentence structures, and expanding the vocabulary used.
Presenting. Once you’ve gone through the intense steps of Planning, Producing, and Polishing, you still have one step left – Presenting. The presentation of a paper – its formatting, neatness, and uniformity – may push your writing from good to great.
This is a very basic, direct, to-the-point grammar and punctuation manual, for those who love that sort of thing (like I do!) Some of the rules may be outdated, but those can be checked easily in "Chicago 16" or online.
This is an excellent resource for any young writer. I absolutely loved this book and would recommend you to read this if you want to be a professional in the field of writing. You can read the full review here: