America's favorite writing coach and bestselling author returns with an "indispensable" guide (Diana K. Sugg, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter) to writing clearly and honestly in a world full of lies, propaganda, and misinformation. The darker and more dystopian the future appears, the more influential public writers become. But with so much content vying for our attention, and so much misinformation and propaganda polluting public discourse, how can writers break through the noise to inform an increasingly busy, stressed, and overwhelmed audience? In Tell It Like It Is, bestselling author, writing coach, and teacher Roy Peter Clark offers a succinct and practical guide to writing with clarity, honesty, and conviction. By analyzing stellar writing samples from a diverse collection of public writers, Clark highlights and explains the tools journalists, scientists, economists, fact-checkers, even storytellers use to engage, inform, and hook readers, and how best to deploy them in a variety of contexts. In doing so, he provides answers to some of the most pressing questions facing writers today: How do I make hard facts—about pandemics, wars, natural disasters, social justice—easy reading? How do I get readers to pay attention to what they need to know? How do I help contribute to a culture of writing that combats misinformation and propaganda? How do I instill hope into the hearts and minds of readers? With Clark's trademark wit, insight, and compassion, Tell It Like It Is offers a uniquely practical and engaging guide to public writing in unprecedented times—and an urgently needed remedy for a dangerously confused world.
The craft of writing offers countless potential problems: The story is too long; the story's too short; revising presents a huge hurdle; writer's block is rearing its ugly head. In Help! For Writers, Roy Peter Clark presents an "owner's manual" for writers, outlining the seven steps of the writing process, and addressing the 21 most urgent problems that writers face. In his trademark engaging and entertaining style, Clark offers ten short solutions to each problem. Out of ideas? Read posters, billboards, and graffiti. Can't bear to edit yourself? Watch the deleted scenes feature of a DVD, and ask yourself why those scenes were left on the cutting-room floor. Help! For Writers offers 210 strategies to guide writers to success.
In this “great and necessary addition to the canon of Vietnam War memoirs” the author “is a thoroughly human Virgil guiding us through the hell of combat” (New York Journal of Books). Peter Clark’s year in Vietnam began in July 1966, when he was shipped out with hundreds of other young recruits as a replacement in the 1st Infantry Division. Assigned to the Alpha Company, Clark gives a visceral and vivid account of life in the platoon as he progresses from green recruit to seasoned soldier over the course of a year. Alpha One Sixteen follows Clark as he discovers how to handle the daily confusion of distinguishing combatants from civilians. The Viet Cong were a largely unseen enemy who fought a guerrilla war, setting traps and landmines everywhere. As he continues his journey, Clark gradually learns the techniques for coping with the daily horrors he encounters, the technical skills needed to fight and survive, and how to deal with the awful reality of civilian casualties. Fighting aside, it rained almost every day, and insect bites constantly plagued the soldiers as they moved through dense jungle, muddy rice paddies, and sandy roads. From the food they ate to the inventive ways they managed to shower—and the off-duty time they spent in the bars of Tokyo—every aspect of the platoon’s lives is explored in this revealing book. A Military Book Club main selection.
A special 10th anniversary edition of Roy Peter Clark's bestselling guide to writing, featuring five bonus tools. Ten years ago, Roy Peter Clark, America's most influential writing teacher, whittled down almost thirty years of experience in journalism, writing, and teaching into a series of fifty short essays on different aspects of writing. In the past decade, Writing Tools has become a classic guidebook for novices and experts alike and remains one of the best loved books on writing available. Organized into four sections, "Nuts and Bolts," "Special Effects," "Blueprints for Stories," and "Useful Habits," Writing Tools is infused with more than 200 examples from journalism and literature. This new edition includes five brand new, never-before-shared tools. Accessible, entertaining, inspiring, and above all, useful for every type of writer, from high school student to novelist, Writing Tools is essential reading.
Early in the history of English, the words "grammar" and "glamour" meant the same thing: the power to charm. Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools, aims to put the glamour back in grammar with this fun, engaging alternative to stuffy instructionals. In this practical guide, readers will learn everything from the different parts of speech to why effective writers prefer concrete nouns and active verbs. The Glamour of Grammar gives readers all the tools they need to"live inside the language" -- to take advantage of grammar to perfect their use of English, to instill meaning, and to charm through their writing. With this indispensable book, readers will come to see just how glamorous grammar can be.
From one of America's most influential teachers, a collection of the best writing advice distilled from fifty language books -- from Aristotle to Strunk and White. With so many excellent writing guides lining bookstore shelves, it can be hard to know where to look for the best advice. Should you go with Natalie Goldberg or Anne Lamott? Maybe William Zinsser or Stephen King would be more appropriate. Then again, what about the classics -- Strunk and White, or even Aristotle himself? Thankfully, your search is over. In Murder Your Darlings, Roy Peter Clark, who has been a beloved and revered writing teacher to children and Pulitzer Prize winners alike for more than thirty years, has compiled a remarkable collection of more than 100 of the best writing tips from fifty of the best writing books of all time. With a chapter devoted to each key strategy, Clark expands and contextualizes the original author's suggestions and offers anecdotes about how each one helped him or other writers sharpen their skills. An invaluable resource for writers of all kinds, Murder Your Darlings is an inspiring and edifying ode to the craft of writing.
Coaching Writers is the first text to outline a complete system for editors to coach journalists. This highly influential text, based on the curriculum and methods of the Poynter Institute, has been updated to include coverage of coaching across media platforms and in diverse newsrooms. It now offers special consideration of ethical concerns. In newsrooms, where the management structure is increasingly flat, everyone needs to be a coach — this book will teach them how.
America's most influential writing teacher offers an engaging and practical guide to effective short-form writing. In How to Write Short, Roy Peter Clark turns his attention to the art of painting a thousand pictures with just a few words. Short forms of writing have always existed-from ship logs and telegrams to prayers and haikus. But in this ever-changing Internet age, short-form writing has become an essential skill. Clark covers how to write effective and powerful titles, headlines, essays, sales pitches, Tweets, letters, and even self-descriptions for online dating services. With examples from the long tradition of short-form writing in Western culture, How to Write Short guides writers to crafting brilliant prose, even in 140 characters.
This novel, "Mama's Boy," is about a pathologically shy, pigeon-toed boy, Peter Macaulay, who everybody, including his parents, considers mentally retarded and incredibly awkward physically. He has no friends and relates only to his mother, Elizabeth, even though when drunk she abuses him verbally and often slaps him. On the eve of high school, a gifted teacher and tutor, Ellen Marie Gaffney, is brought into Peter's life by his father, Jack, who is embarrassed by his son known at school as "The Geek." Jack hopes Miss Gaffney can prepare Peter academically for high school. The father also bribes the school principal with a $10,000 check to have Peter placed on the all-black basketball team. Two blacks, Fred "Sweetie" Davis and James "Big Daddy" Winkfield, take Peter under their wings, although other blacks bully him physically and verbally, often threatening his life. The female protagonist of the novel, 21-year-old Nora Quindt, a senior at the University of California at Berkeley, becomes Peter's second tutor, and through her growing emotional attachment to this 16-year-old "child" becomes part of the black basketball world of Castlemont High School in Oakland, California. The overall theme of this novel revolves around black-white relations in America. The author, Peter Clark, went to Castlemont, an inner-city school that was 60 percent black in 1958-1961, and was personal friends with Fred Davis and James Winkfield.
Following a quiet period in global M&A activity, a new boom seems to be underway, but in an age where two-thirds of all merger deals can be said to fail (where deals fall short of the minimum required financial returns to the acquiring company), how can future success be guaranteed? And what can acquirers, and their shareholders and advisers, do to improve the chances of success? Masterminding the Deal looks at performance in two critical areas - merger segmentation (the identification of critical characteristics and attributes separating more successful mergers from the rest) and category-specific synergy diagnosis (the differentiation of synergy benefits - expenses, revenues, tax - to ensure maximum rewards). Through this in-depth analysis, the book provides the managers and advisers of acquiring firms with concise and actionable frameworks to improve and enhance merger performance. Masterminding the Deal will help you to identify and apply the key components of merger success.
Staff Monkeys is not a typical military war journal; it is a chronological and humorous accounting of a former stockbroker's observations during his military deployments from April 2005 through September 2009. After being recalled to the Army, Peter Clark served in East Africa as well as numerous Middle East hot spots. Over the years, he served in Djibouti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Kyrgyzstan. War is a very serious business, yet strange and comical events do occur and US Army Staff Monkey, Lt. Colonel Peter Clark tells about them in an entertaining way.
Peter Clark shares over 60 years of hard-won experience as a beekeeper in this conversational and practical guide to beekeeping. Writing from South Africa his essential knowledge of the honeybee is transferable to many regions and climates. In Tales of an African Beekeeper you will find entertaining tales and valuable material into which you can dive at will, each of the chapters standing alone to become a lifelong reference book and manual.
Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul: these are only three names that have been given to the city that straddles two continents, was the capital of two multinational empires and is today a vibrant commercial and artistic city, the largest in Turkey and, after Moscow, the largest in Europe. With its location as a port, Istanbul has always absorbed ideas, people and styles from north, south, east and west. Its multiculturalism is a microcosm of the world’s. Neither standard guide nor conventional history, this is rather a celebration of an extraordinary city, reviewing its imperial histories and exploring some of its lesser known corners.
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