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Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser

by Roy Peter Clark

A cross-generational guide to the practical choices behind strong writing

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AlbakiReads Editorial

A cross-generational guide to the practical choices behind strong writing

Roy Peter Clark gathers more than 100 pieces of advice from fifty writing books, placing classical sources such as Aristotle alongside modern guides by writers including Strunk and White, William Zinsser, Stephen King, Natalie Goldberg, and Anne Lamott. Organized in chapters around individual strategies, the book does more than list maxims: Clark expands on their context and uses anecdotes about their application to writing practice. The collection maps recurring craft concerns across different traditions of writing instruction, offering a single volume built around sentence-level and larger compositional decisions.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Writers seeking a wide-ranging reference to established writing advice
  • Students or teachers interested in comparing approaches to writing craft
  • Anyone who enjoys language and writing instruction drawn from multiple eras

Themes

Writing craftStyle and compositionWriting instructionLiterary adviceLanguage

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Book overview

From one of America's most influential teachers, a collection of the best writing advice distilled from fifty language books -- from Aristotle to Strunk and White.

With so many excellent writing guides lining bookstore shelves, it can be hard to know where to look for the best advice. Should you go with Natalie Goldberg or Anne Lamott? Maybe William Zinsser or Stephen King would be more appropriate. Then again, what about the classics -- Strunk and White, or even Aristotle himself?

Thankfully, your search is over. In Murder Your Darlings, Roy Peter Clark, who has been a beloved and revered writing teacher to children and Pulitzer Prize winners alike for more than thirty years, has compiled a remarkable collection of more than 100 of the best writing tips from fifty of the best writing books of all time.

With a chapter devoted to each key strategy, Clark expands and contextualizes the original author's suggestions and offers anecdotes about how each one helped him or other writers sharpen their skills. An invaluable resource for writers of all kinds, Murder Your Darlings is an inspiring and edifying ode to the craft of writing.
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