Product Description

Today's writer needs more than just a solid knowledge of usage and composition to write successfully. Bestselling author Arthur Plotnik reveals the secrets to attention-grabbing, unforgettable writing, in this trade paperback edition.

Updated with all-new writing exercises, Spunk & Bite will help writers take books, articles, business reports, memos, and even e-mail messages to the next level.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169494 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-08
• Released on: 2007-05-08
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.21" h x .83" w x 5.44" l, .75 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Booklist
Plotnik, author of the well-respected Elements of Editing (1982), takes on the venerable duo of Strunk and White in this peppery guide to vibrant writing. Implying that Strunk and White's revered Elements of Style might be a little stodgy in its prescriptive approach to language, Plotnik advocates that writers judiciously bend the rules, "drawing on all levels of language to animate expression." To that end, he devotes 31 chapters to detailed analyses of the factors that make language sing. He is especially adept at providing exactly the right felicitous quotation to make his point and draws from a wide variety of writers. In discussing onomatopoeia, for example, he cites the "THROCK" and "SPLOOSH" of graphic novelist Mike Allred and also excerpts comedic writer James Thurber, who long ago was writing about tires that "booped and whooshed." In addition, Plotnik addresses such practical topics as the question of audience, providing a pocket guide to the different generations and their wildly varying approaches to the written word. Moving seamlessly between instruction and quotation, Plotnik's work makes for addictive reading for both aspiring and veteran writers. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Billy Collins, former American Poet Laureate
A must for every writer's desk.

Richard Lederer, co-author of The Write Way and Comma Sense
...Plotnik not only knows how to write about spunk and bite. He writes with spunk and bite. So will you, if you take in the wisdom of his colorful, learned, and caring advice.

Andrea J. Sutcliffe, editor, The New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage
Spunk & Bite belongs next to Strunk and White on every writer's desk.

Poynter Online - (Chip Scanlan, “Chip on Your Shoulder”), March 6, 2006
Instead of rules, Spunk & Bite offers choices bolstered with real-world examples. . . . Plotnik . . . zooms in close, helping writers deconstruct their prose from the ground floor -- word to clause to sentence -- up to paragraphs and chapters to our Holy Grail, a finished piece of writing. . . . Unlike Strunk & White's catalogue of abstractions and rhetorical ruler slaps, Plotnik's Spunk & Bite is refreshingly concrete. Its author know his linguistic stuff and so can you.

College and Research Library News - March 2006 (George Eberhart)
[A] bookful of remedies for literary listlessness, sprinkled with examples of ringing prose penned by wordsmiths from Poe to Proulx. Plotnik rips past the rigid rules of Strunk and White’s 1959 Elements of Style and calls on writers to invigorate stodgy phrasings and pallid diction with freshness, texture, force, and form. Each chapter contains apt advice on what to avoid (actionless action, wandering modifiers, exhausted adverbs) and what to emulate (over-the-top tropes, killer megaphors, enallage, foreignisms, nuanced semicolons, edgy style). An energetic and entertaining read for cramped writers.

About the Author
Arthur Plotnik is a former publishing executive and author of the Book of the Month Club selections The Elements of Editing and The Elements of Expression: Putting Thoughts into Words.