Study Guides
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1.
Elements of Good Creative Writing Help
Introduction to the Elements of Good Creative Writing The novelist Andre Dubus III said in an online interview with Random House: I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. I rarely feel it ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
2.
Exercises to Build Your "Good Writing" Muscles Help
Practice with Sensory Images To build convincing and engaging experience on the page, to make their created worlds vivid, writers employ all five senses in their writing, rather than summarize or editorialize. Using images from childhood speeds the process of ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
3.
Additional Exercises to Build Your "Good Writing" Muscles Help
Practice with Metaphor and Simile In a metaphor, the writer compares two unalike things to refresh our experience of the first. "My desk is my spaceship," a grade-schooler says, and we know something about his imagination and spirit. "When I soak in ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
4.
Lyric Techniques in Your Language Help
Paying attention to the music in your poetry and prose helps you build the emotional content and meaning of your writing: An essential element for good writing is a good ear: one must listen to the sound of one's prose.
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
5.
Onomatopoeia, Alliteration, and Rhyme Help
Onomatopoeia The term onomatopoeia comes from the Greek for "word-making." It means the employment of one or more words to imitate, echo, or suggest the sound of the thing or action described. Such words include bang, click, fizz, hush, buzz, moo, quack, ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
6.
Additional Elements and Exercises for Good Writing Help
Vary Sentence Length and Subject-Verb Positions; Use Parallel Construction Here is a passage from my memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief. With the box of Seth's ashes by my feet on the passenger side of the ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
7.
Keep Yourself Writing Help
Keep Yourself Writing One way to build up enthusiasm for developing drafts is to gather first-reader response. But there is a trick to gathering responses that help you as a writer. Author is the root of "authority." Never forget it. People's responses ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
8.
Poetry Writing Help
What is Poetry? William Wordsworth famously defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and Emily Dickinson explained the sensation of poetry this way, "If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
9.
Subgenres of Poetry Help
The Three Main Subgenres of Poetry: Lyric, Narrative, and Prose Basically, although all poems operate by heightened language, there are three categories into which most poems fit. Lyric The term lyric poetry ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional -
10.
Practice for Writing Poetry Help
Practice for Writing Poetry Writing poetry does take a certain frame of mind—one in which we realize that small things hold great emotional meaning. To write poems, we have to trust that the everyday objects we notice and remember will help us identify, ...
Source: McGraw-Hill Professional
