Full Description
A Way with Words helps readers learn the essentials of writing. Rather than lecturing about when to use who or whom, this book focuses on writing clear, concise, and lively prose: eliminating wordiness, using active verbs, avoiding run-on sentences. John Marsh applies his experience grading over 5,000 essays over a quarter century as a teacher to take readers through the issues he most commonly sees. While Marsh teaches in the humanities, the advice applies to writing regardless of discipline.
Using examples from papers students might actually write, the book invites readers to apply what they have learned to quizzes that mix and match issues—vague pronouns, sentence fragments, punctuating quotations—from previous chapters. The book includes a thoughtful discussion about balancing the competing demands of writing well and fighting linguistic discrimination. Finally, A Way with Words prompts readers to consider what artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT and Bard will mean for student writing. It offers advice about how writers can distinguish their writing from the assembly-line writing that artificial intelligence tends to generate, and how they can develop their style to stand out to their teachers, employers, and clients.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
A Difficult Dilemma: On Concision
Passive Aggressive: On the Active and Passive Voice
Lights, Camera, Action Verbs!
Lost Connections: Modifiers, Parallelism, Transitions, and Vague Pronouns
Better Late Than Never: On Clichés
The Art of Joinery: Fragments, Run-Ons, and the Oxford Comma
The Long and Short of It: On Sentence Variety
Pretentious Diction: On the Sesquipedalian
Conventions
Inclusion
Putting It All Together: Quizzes
Answers to Exercises
Answers to Quizzes
Notes
