Writing

Because Writing Matters examines the myths and realities surrounding the teaching of writing in schools. This important book reveals how kids learn to write, what schools need to do to teach writing effectively, and shows that effective writing teachers address more than content and skills. Sponsored by the National Writing Project, a nationally recognized organization for teachers, Because Writing Matters offers step-by-step recommendations for developing effective writing programs in all grades. Each of the book's action steps is prioritized from the easily achieved to the larger and longer term.

Congratulations Graduate! is a collection of 21 inspiring commencement addresses by notable achievers, including Tom Hanks, Arianna Huffington, David Sedaris, Anna Quindlen, Barbara Kingsolver, David McCullough, Anna Deavere Smith, Thomas L. Friedman, Wendell Berry, Muhammad Yunus, Kathryn Sullivan, Ian McEwan, Anne Lamott, and more! This book offers a diverse array of moving, uplifting, and wonderfully humorous commencement addresses that provide important life lessons and inspiration. Congratulations Graduate! is the perfect gift for graduates!

When Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, Walt Whitman declared it "the volcanic upheaval of the nation"--the bloody inception of a war that would dramatically alter the shape and character of American culture along with its political, racial, and social landscape. Prior to the war, America's leading writers had been integral to helping the young nation imagine itself, assert its beliefs, and realize its immense potential. When the Civil War erupted, it forced them to witness not only unimaginable human carnage on the battlefield, but also the disintegration of the foundational symbolic order they had helped to create. The war demanded new frameworks for understanding the world and new forms of communication that could engage with the immensity of the conflict. It fostered both social and cultural experimentation.

Now available in paperback, From Battlefields Rising explores the profound impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. As the writers of the time grappled with the war's impact on the individual and the national psyche, their responses multiplied and transmuted. Whitman's poetry and prose, for example, was chastened and deepened by his years spent ministering to wounded soldiers; off the battlefield, the anguish of war would come to suffuse the austere, elliptical poems that Emily Dickinson was writing from afar; and Hawthorne was rendered silent by his reading of military reports and talks with soldiers. Calling into question every prior presumption and ideal, the war forever changed America's early idealism-and consequently its literature-into something far more ambivalent and raw.

An absorbing group portrait of the period's most important writers, From Battlefields Rising flashes with forgotten historical details and elegant new ideas. It alters previous perceptions about the evolution of American literature and how Americans have understood and expressed their common history.

For Emma Rous, the natural environment offers countless ways to engage students in significant reading, writing, and thinking. She breaks down the barriers between school and life. She raises complex ethical questions. She creates a course of study her students care about.

With Literature and the Land, Rous not only inspires you to help students become environmentally literate, she provides the tools you need to make it happen. Beginning with readings and exercises about perception, the book explores a wealth of nature writing activities, the history of people's relationship with nature from mythological times to the present, case studies of current environmental issues and action projects, environmental themes in fiction and poetry, and the potential of outdoor adventure. The book is packed with descriptions of literature, classroom activities, student responses, and lists of resources. The materials are all designed to support a heterogeneous classroom, a student-centered pedagogy, and a gender-balanced curriculum.

Ideal for teachers looking for new ways to make the literature classroom both interdisciplinary and experiential, Literature and the Land is a one-of-a-kind reference-whether you're attempting to implement a single unit on nature literature or a full course of study.

With this innovative guide, writing a nonfiction book proposal that sells is both simple and intuitive. A boon to professionals who want to write and anyone who regularly works with writers: teachers, editors, publishers, and agents.

The Best Resource for Getting Your Fiction Published!

The 2015 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market is the only resource you'll need to get your short stories, novellas, and novels published. As with past editions, Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers hundreds of listings for book publishers, literary agents, fiction publications, contests, and more. Each listing includes contact information, submission guidelines, and other important tips.

New to this year's edition: Gain access to the exclusive webinar "Blockbuster Fiction: Exploring Emotional High Points in Popular Films" from best-selling author Cheryl St. John. This 45-minute webinar explores the ten most popular films of 2013--including Frozen, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and more--to show you how to create intense, emotional, engrossing moments in your fiction. When you make your readers care about your characters and your story, you'll evoke excitement, indignation, fear, anxiety, tears, and laughter--and keep them hooked from start to finish.

You'll also find articles and interviews on all aspects of the writing life, from in-depth lessons on craft and technique to helpful advice on getting published and marketing your work. The 2015 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers everything a fiction writer needs to achieve publishing success, including articles and essays like these:

J.T. Ellison, New York Times best-selling author, reveals how to capture - and keep - reader interest.

Ransom Riggs, mega-popular YA novelist, shares advice on writing out-of-the-ordinary fiction.

Chuck Wendig, hybrid author extraordinaire, talks about the pros and cons of traditional and self-publishing.

You'll also receive:

A free digital download of Writer's Yearbook featuring the 100 Best Markets

"If you're looking for the best resource for connecting with publishers who are hungry for your fiction, you've found it. Ten novels ago I got my start as an author using Writer's Market guides." -Steven James, writing instructor and best-selling author of The King and Story Trumps Structure

"If you can't go to every literary cocktail party in New York, get this book. It's an instant network." -Elizabeth Sims, best-selling author of You've Got a Book in You

In offices across America, the Masters of Gobbledygook are hard at work. They're bombarding in-boxes with those long, confusing memos that colleagues don't have the patience to read--and bosses don't have the time to rewrite. They use words like "commence" or "prior to" instead of "begin" or "before." They bury their main point somewhere in the last paragraph--and take two pages to get there. Everybody knows one of them; in fact, you may even be one of them. But now there's help for anyone who's ever fallen prey to businessese, academese, legalese, or any other "ese" when faced with a blank memo pad.
In The Plain English Approach to Business Writing, Edward Bailey--who spent twenty years working in the bastions of bureaucratese--offers readers a powerful new communications tool. Written for busy professionals who want to improve the quality and clarity of their own (or their staff's) writing style, this no-nonsense guide is an indispensable office companion. Bailey's approach is 5urprisingly straightforward: just write as you would talk. Plain English is not only easier to read; it's also easier to write. And it's so effective that many large organizations are endorsing, if not demanding, its use in the work place. Pithy and entertaining, Bailey points out all the dos and don'ts of plain English. He then illustrates them with examples drawn from a wide array of sources, including business documents, technical manuals, trade publications like Consumer Reports, and the works of writers such as Russell Baker and John D. MacDonald. From the basics to the fine tuning, he offers practical advice on clarity and precision, organization, layout, and a host of other important writing topics.
A delightful, down-to-earth guide, The Plain English Approach to Business Writing is for professionals of all backgrounds (government, military, legal, financial, technical, corporate) and staff at all levels (from the company CEO to the ambitious secretary). The Plain English Approach to Business Writing can be read in an hour--and used for the rest of one's life.

For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders' Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father's striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen's own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self-each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer's life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, "Tiger Writing" radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.

Inside The Wicked Wit of Charles Dickens, readers take a journey into the classically humorous and almost goofy side of one of the most famous writers in world history. readers will find a timeline of Charles Dickens's Life, several short stories, a whole chapter of Dickens's bumblings, and quotes from some of Dickens's most famous papers.

Dickens was a wonderfully smart child who excelled in school but became a victim of poverty. In his later years, this childhood of poverty would influence him greatly and a great deal of his material was based on this life. When his father was sent to prison, Dickens's mother and siblings accompanied his father and went to live inside the prison in one small room while Charles was sent into lodgings beside the prison and worked at a blacking factory.

The Wicked Wit of Charles Dickenstakes Dickens's lovers through a history of some of his lesser-known stories and introduces the reader to a side of Dickens that may not have been seen before, the wickedly entertaining and funny side. The beautifully bound hardcover will look incredible resting on anyone's coffee table or bookshelf and can be considered a collectible book. Researched and compiled by Shelley Klein, this book is a must-have for any Classic Literature fan who is a current or former fan of Dickens.