Writing

Are you an author? Do you have a new book that you're looking to promote to potential new fans? Have you considered venturing out into the book signing circuit? Maybe you've thought about it for a while but haven't been sure how to go about it. Perhaps you're reluctant because you don't know what to expect. Book Signing 101: An Author's Guide gives you a simple and straightforward breakdown of everything involved in book signing events, from where to hold your event, what to have with you, what to avoid, how to save money, how to carry yourself like a professional author and much more.

This work sheds new light on the way nine women writers of Lawrence's time and ours reacted to his fiction, poetry, and criticism in their own work.

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 nearly half a century, the style recommended by the Modern Language Association for scholarly manuscripts and student research papers has been widely adopted and required not only by journals and presses but also by schools, departments, and individual instructors. Since the publication of the first edition in 1977, the MLA Handbook has sold over five million copies worldwide.

The fifth edition of the MLA Handbook is revamped for the Internet age. A complete toolbox for online research, this edition offers guidance in
-- finding research materials online
-- judging the quality of information on the Internet
-- using expanded and updated MLA formats to document a wide variety of online sources
-- preparing texts in electronic form

The MLA Handbook's authoritative guidelines on research practices and MLA style are enhanced in other ways. New topics have been added, and citation examples, the list of suggested writing guides, and the appendix of reference works by field have been expanded and updated.

The fifth edition serves as both a classroom text and a reference book for students and writers to use independently. Teachers and students of writing, literature, languages, philosophy, and other humanities fields will find this guide indispensable.

When we open the gates to nonfiction inquiry, we open our thinking and expect the unexpected, making reading discoveries, research discoveries, and writing discoveries on our way. Nonfiction Matters offers teachers the tools to help students explore nonfiction and dig deep to reach more complete understanding of the real world and report these insights in a compelling manner.

Stephanie Harvey shows how students can read expository text, engage in research, and write authentic nonfiction that is captivating, visual, and full of voice. The inquiry projects she describes require in-depth learning: topic selection, question development, research exploration, reading for content, organization, synthesis, writing to convey meaning, and presenting findings--all skills that develop independent thinkers who know how to make decisions, solve problems, and apply their knowledge insightfully.

Full of practical suggestions to help you bring nonfiction into your curriculum, Nonfiction Matters: presents strategies for understanding expository text and conducting meaningful research;offers ideas for organizing and writing accurate, effective nonfiction from idea to finished presentation;advances the importance of teacher modeling and guided practice in instructional delivery;provides a list of inquiry tools and resources--both print and electronic;suggests ways to facilitate project-based learning and assess the projects as they develop;includes bibliographies of nonfiction children's books by subject and genre and lists of recommended magazines.

Why is nonfiction almost a guaranteed success? The key to teaching with nonfiction is passion, for children are passionate inquirers, and nonfiction fuels their curiosity and their demand for knowledge and understanding of the world.

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.

This handbook offers an overview of the writing process, with focused discussions of critical reading, developing ideas, paragraph construction, grammar, types of essays, sentence clarity, diction, punctuation and mechanics, research, document design, business writing, oral presentations, and more.

A testament to the belief that teachers should be writers, "Workshop 6" invites readers into the classrooms and minds of teachers who write. Barbieri and Rief celebrate the power of writing and invite teachers to become more seriously involved in writing for themselves.