By Roy Peter Clark
Little, Brown and Company
Hardcover

You may be writing a newspaper story or an essay for school. You may be writing on the job or drafting your first novel. You may be a student or a teacher, a poet, a playwright or a critic, a columnist or a blogger.

Whatever your writing task, you can become a more effective writer. You just need the right tools.

Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer Excerpt Tool 14: Get the name of the dog Novelist Joseph Conrad once described his task this way: “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel -- it is, before all, to make you see.” When Gene Roberts, a great American newspaper editor, broke in as a cub reporter in North Carolina, he read his stories aloud to a blind editor who would chastise young Roberts for not making him see. ©2006 Roy Peter Clark Published with permission from Little, Brown and Company

Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer offers practical tools that dispel writing inhibitions and make the craft accessible to everyone. From nuts and bolts (Tool 3: Activate your verbs) to useful habits (Tool 43: Read for both form and content), the book equips its readers to be better students, workers, citizens, people.

Roy Peter Clark draws on years of personal experience to create these tools. He is the author or editor of fourteen books about writing and journalism.

He also looks to such classics as The Elements of Style and On Writing Well. He teaches from the wisdom of George Orwell, Natalie Goldberg and Anne Lamott.

Writing tools is divided into four sections dealing with grammar, clarity, organization and production. Each tool occupies only a few pages. They may be read one at a time or several at a time. The author recommends mastering one per week.

The writing is clear and easy to understand. The advice is impeccable. Every tool is a valuable addition to any writer’s tool chest.

Bookworm's Briefing
Writing Tools covers many facets of the craft in an accessible and well-organized manner. It offers advice on everything from the technical aspects of grammar to the writing life. It is one the best writing books available and deserves a spot on the shelf next to the masters.