junkmail for blankets

things i sorta believe

before i left covenant seminary, i was asked to give a briefish presentation for incoming students on how to write (and not write) papers. yeah, right. if anyone out there's insanely bored, and wants my short, generic take on writing, here it is. i stole a lot of it, like all honest writers.

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The first thing I want to say about writing a paper is don’t ever use the phrase “the first thing I want to say is.”

By the authority vested in me as writing workshop co-presenter, I declare to you, “grammar” is not an expletive. You could argue whether it’s descriptive or prescriptive, but expletive it is not.

If I had time, I’d serenade you with the beauty of clauses and modifiers and conjunctions; alas, time is short, and I can’t, but if you really want to know more, invite me over to dinner some night (I’ll need a chalkboard and a good merlot).

For the sake of time, and so I can get some grammar in, I’m going to give you this dummy’s guide to shortcut grammar, and rapidly, if only to save your professors some grief. So that it will seem somehow more spiritual, I’m going to give it to you in sevens. Seven grammar/usage tips that’ll save us all some grief:

1. Who/Whom: replace with he/him; turn question into declaration; almost foolproof

2. Compounds: Dr. Doriani said he was taking he and I/him and me to the game, but he really took us to his driveway to wash his car.
Take the compound apart and analyze individually.

3. Indefinite pronoun: ____one and ____body (everyone, e.g.) singular, though this one’s already been changing.

4. Subjunctive: was vs. were – contrary to present fact, use were (Hungry for a sandwich that you don’t have? Wish you were at the Sub Junction?)

5. Fanboys: For And Nor But Or Yet So (coordinating conjunction) and comma to separate independent clauses (sentences)

6. Verbals: Gerbils look like animals but really aren’t. Verbals look like verbs but really aren’t. geruNd (Noun), participle (adjective), infinitive (almost anything)

7. 7 “Rules” (adapted from Writing With Style); some teacher along the way said these were rules, and who am I to question Mrs. Grafkanovich?

- Never begin a sentence with “and” or “but” [But sometimes you just need to. Use it to create a conversational mood, or for transition]

- Never use contractions [If you do not, you are in for some unpleasant prose, and I shall bet that most people will agree]

- Never refer to the reader as “you” [You should do this - not anyone else, but you]

- Never use the first-person pronoun “I” [I, not anyone else, say it’s okay; the royal “we” is usually pompous, and “one” is better suited for arithmetic]

- Never end a sentence with a preposition [I refer you to Winston Churchill, who said, “This is the type of arrant pedantry, up with which I shall not put.”]

- Never split an infinitive [Two reasons to quickly forget this rule: 1. With informal writing, at least, we communicate more idiomatically, in common speech – this is the way we speak. 2. It allows the modifying adverb to be positioned where it will receive the notice it deserves, which is directly before the verb (“To really show me you love me, you must have me over for dinner.” Much better than “Really to show me . . .” and “To show me you really love me . . .”)]

- Never write a paragraph containing a single sentence (Thomas Lynch, 7): Speaking of a minister who wanted to be an example of simplicity and piety, “When I told him that he needn’t wait, that he could begin his ministry of good example even today, that he could quit the country club and do his hacking at the public links and trade his brougham for a used Chevette; that free of his Florsheims and cashmeres and prime ribs, free of his bingo nights and building funds, he could become, for Christ’s sake, the very incarnation of Francis himself, or Anthony of Padua; when I said, in fact, that I would be willing to assist him in this, that I would gladly distribute his savings and his credit cards among the worthy poor of the parish, and that I would, when the sad duty called, bury him for free in the manner he would have, by then, become accustomed to; when I told your man these things, he said nothing at all, but turned his wild eye on me in the way that the cleric must have looked on Sweeney years ago, before he cursed him, irreversibly, into a bird.”

I’ll justify that in a moment, but for now, cross those 7 rules out on your paper. Violently. Pretend it’s a tax form. Pretend it’s the ACT the third time you took it. Pretend it’s a Snickers wrapper after a fast. These are good ideas, not biblical mandates. The important principle underlying so many of these issues is that your form should match your content. For instance, if you want to convey the urgency of a matter, or your conviction on an issue, write a single-sentenced paragraph, like the one I read from Lynch; the pace of the sentence will convey the message, like you want to get it all out in one breath. If you want to convey the simplicity of an argument, or you want to place emphasis on a specific word, make the sentence short, or place the word where it’ll hit the ear the hardest. This is an issue of style, and this, then, is my transition from grammar to style.

When I say “style,” you may be thinking runways, or fashion magazines, or your dad’s white shorts and navy blue socks and Sebagos as he stood outside his car waiting to pick you up from high school and your friends asked if that was your dad and you put Peter to shame with the vehemence of your denials. If that’s what you think when I say “style,” then good on ‘ya. That’s a good way to think about it. If your writing is sloppy and non-chalant, you’ve got the mid-90’s Smells-Like-Teen-Spirit grunge thing going on. If it’s tight and constricting and leaves little to the imagination, you’ve got the mid-80’s Panador parachute pants and Vans thing going on. If it’s clean and sporty and above-average for its age, you’ve got the Dr. Doriani tennis thing going on.

Your style is the variety of ways that your friend or your wife could be blindfolded and pick you out of a lineup by hearing a phrase that you always use, or the way that you talk on the phone, or the way that you drive. Your job is to write in a way so that someone who knows you well could read 101 essays and pick yours out of the pile. Your job is to do this without just vomiting your thoughts all over the page or in your keyboard; to do this in a way that’s concise, concrete, and creative; I’ll say more on that in a few minutes. I want to speak, first, about the principles behind developing style, about the things that happen before you begin writing. Suffer a theological analogy: if the act of writing is the atonement, then what I’m about to discuss is prayer, the prayer in Gethsemane, the prayer as Christ bore the cross, the prayer from the cross. Before you write, while you write, these things support and make possible everything you’ll produce.

People often ask me, usually on the way to something that affords them about 28 seconds for a response, how to write. Imagine someone’s asking you to describe your spouse in 28 seconds (you may think this analogy isn’t very good, that I can’t compare writing to a lover; you’ve obviously not been introduced to my love life). So, when people ask me how to improve their writing (like asking how to pray), and they want it all in a few seconds, I give them the writer’s prayer, the fundamentals: I say, “Live well, read well, and write poorly.”

First, in order to write well, you must live well. Live well. For those of you who think that all that writers do is sit around in coffee shops and maybe write a good sentence every few hours, you’re right. Some of us, at least. But hopefully, what the good writers are doing is this: every time the door opens, every time the people at the counter speak, when the coffee goes cold, when a leaf falls outside the window, the writer is noticing, the writer is collecting and storing, chewing cud, burying acorns, taking advantage of his position to notice the mundane, and to notice grace in the mundane, and this is what he writes about. While everyone else is busy worrying about soy milk and being late for something, the writer is noticing. Pay attention to things; keep notecards somewhere handy, so that when an image hits you, or an idea slaps you, you can stop what you’re doing and write it down. You won’t remember later. I promise you, you will not remember later! When you’re assigned a paper, think about it when you’re away from campus. You’ll see things and hear things that’ll jog your mind. If, for some reason, you have other minor responsibilities, like marriage or student loans or ministry, and you have to think about those things, remember, if nothing else, that if you’re doing those things well, you’re living well, that you’ll have all the interesting material you’ll need.

Second, you must read well. Mrs. Grafkanovich didn’t teach me grammar or writing; neither did any of my other teachers during my 24-year romp through the school system. I learned as I read good books. I’m convinced that the best way to improve your writing is to read good writing. If you don’t remember any of what I say, at least go buy a good book. I know you’re busy, but you can read one good book a year. Make time. Read while you’re eating if you’re single; if you’re married, discuss this with your spouse. I’ve listed a couple of my favorite books at the bottom of your page, some good places to start, but if you want some other suggestions, please talk with me.

Finally, you must write poorly; or, better, you must be willing to write poorly. You know that thing that people call “writer’s block”? You know what it’s really called? Perfectionism. Waiting for inspiration is like waiting for your roommate to take out the garbage. Or waiting for the perfect moment to meet your spouse, like on an airplane, or something like that, if people do that. Just write. Something, anything. Imagine you’ve been given a $15,000 shopping spree at Home Depot, or your favorite coffee shop, and write about it. Get the pen or the keyboard moving. If you’re not willing to write terrible first drafts, you will suffer. Do not seek the perfect first draft (for you O Brother fans). It’s okay if the paper’s not very good. If you don’t start writing it, you won’t have even the chance to improve upon it later. Another facet of the perfectionist plague is comparing yourself to other writers. Don’t do it. Your writing deserves better than to have a Pharisee at the controls. Be gracious to yourself. When you have to do group projects, you can toss all your lofty non-perfectionist ideals out the window; if you want to hear how not to handle that, come see me, or talk to any of the people who have had the misfortune of being in groups with me.

Live well, read well, and write poorly.

Before I get to the three C’s – be concise, be concrete, be creative – I want to tell you why they’re important. Contrary to popular opinion, people are not standing in line to read our writing. And before you object, your mom does not count. Your professor, though somehow obligated to read your writing, is not eager to read essay number 73 on “Christian Perseverance: How Eric Liddell rejuvenated my preaching.” Write every paper under the assumption that your professor is tired and ready to go home. Write every paper under the assumption that every reader is tired. Flannery O’Connor says, “You may say that the serious writer doesn’t have to bother about the tired reader, but he does, because they are all tired. One old lady who wants her heart lifted up wouldn’t be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.” Your reader doesn’t owe you anything. It’s your job to give him a reason to keep reading against all rationality. As Anne Lamott says, “An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift.” She’s not referring to a spiritual gift, so don’t try to excuse yourself. She’s speaking in terms of what you give to the reader. Being thoughtful with your writing is an act of ministry. I know you don’t have hours to spend on your book responses, but give the professor something to smile about, or something for which he can thank the Lord that he’s doing something right in his teaching. As an example, I had about one hour to write a counseling reflection project before it was due. And however terrible the rest of the paper was, my professor was at least willing, even glad, to read the paper based on the way it began: The breeze felt right. I didn’t know I needed to be rescued. The noose slipped and the rope climbed the back of my neck, rubbed my jawline up to the ears and behind. The friction made a noise like my name being whispered. I’m dying and someone’s sounding my name; this is what I was made to die for. My paper was about my need to be needed, and instead of saying, “This paper is about my need to be needed,” I tried to give him a reason to keep reading, something to make it my paper, a way for him to remember that he’s reading the paper of a student with a sore heart and a desire to be heard. But now I’m getting into the three C’s, so let me end this section with a quote I have written down, and I don’t remember who wrote it: “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients [aka, the way our professors feel sometimes reading our papers]. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”

Now, the three C’s. Concise, concrete, and creative. Three C’s. One C is average. Three C’s is more than one C; thus, three C’s is more than average. For your writing to be more than average, use three C’s: concise, concrete, creative. I think I just created a semantic fallacy.

Be concise

Hi, I’m Jeremy Huggins, and I’m a recovering logorrheic. If you haven’t picked up on this yet, being concise is my Achilles Heel, my weak spot, my downfall, my . . . . Superfluous words are insulting. They clutter your paper, and they keep the professors in their offices late at night, while their families are home waiting for them, sad and lonely and in tears, wondering, “Mama, where’s Papa?” Get rid of the clutter. Death to clutter! Katie mentioned this already, but it’s worth repeating. Do not write: "In a funny sort of way; you are probably aware that; I believe/I may be wrong (this is your paper, your thesis; don’t give the reader the option of tuning out); at this point in time. Delete unnecessary prepositions. How do you free up something? Where does it go? Can’t you just free something without freeing it up? Don’t refer to a 'personal' friend or a 'personal' opinion; it’s not someone else’s friend or an animal opinion. Don’t say a few “short” minutes later." Does that mean 59 seconds, 58? (Zinsser)

Get rid of cliche; give it a shot to the heart; make it dead as a doornail. Cliche is evidence of thoughtlessness. Don’t say that someone “enjoyed” a slump. Who enjoys a slump?

Don’t say, “I might add.” Don’t qualify everything you say; qualifications whittle away the reader’s trust.

The most practical way to practice concision is to focus on actors and actions. Focus on nouns and verbs. 90% of adjectives are the result of either laziness or weak nouns. Use adverbs when necessary. Only then.

Walter Wangerin is my favorite author. He says much, and beautifully, but he is concise. He focuses on actors and actions. Listen to this section of a story about a baglady in his worship service, and notice the strong nouns and verbs, the power in them, and the relative lack of adjectives and adverbs: (Miz Lil, 114) “I wanted so badly to laugh, because God was roaring a wonderful thunder, surely. The baglady had been a joke, yes – and the joke was God’s. When I had first approached her pew, all crippled with fear, this is what the crook-backed woman hissed at me: ‘It’s damn if I will,’ she said. ‘It’s damn if I want to, Preacher. You’ll never get me to stop my swearing!’ What would the LaSalle Street Christians make of that? My ears uncorked to hear her. But I drove my story onward nonetheless. And when she handed me the carton of milk, when all of the people exhaled their sentimental sigh, she sharpened her weasel-gaze and hissed: ‘This—is—poison. Hee-hee! Hee-hee!’ The messenger of God was cracked. And so was I, to her shrewd eye. Oh, we were a subversive pair in this rational middle mix, Americans at worship. They had no idea what sedition they’d taken to their bosoms-- And God was pounding his thighs and weeping with the laughter surely.”

Earlier in the book, describing a beat-up truck passing him on the road, he writes, “A pickup labored by, muttering smoke.” Strong nouns, strong verbs. So concise. After you write, go through your paper and try to replace all the weak verbs, the ones Katie mentioned before. Eliminate all unnecessary passive verbs and make them active (explain?). Identify vague nouns and specify. Don’t refer to your friend; tell me her name. Now we’re running into the second C.

Be concrete

As tempting as it is to be abstract and trick your reader into thinking that you know what you’re talking about and deflect his attention from your inability to produce a clear proposition, you must not do it. You are writing to serve, not to impress. Dare to write simply. Unless abstract is necessary, write simply. Listen to Wangerin again: (Ragman 66)

"He had a bottom lip like a shelf. Upon that shelf he placed lit cigarettes, and then he did not remove them again until they had burned quite down, at which moment he blew them toward the television set. Burning, they hit the newspapers on the floor. But it is impossible to ignite a fine, moist mildew. Blessedly, they went out.”

versus the not-so-concrete:

His lower lip was quite a protruberance. It was like he was lighting cigarettes and they were just hovering there, and they were like magic, floating there as they incinerated, until he spit them out of his mouth in a flick-like motion and they flicked toward the TV. They landed on the floor, which was like a landfill of aging paper. But it never happened, that thing we call burning, because growth and rotting wouldn’t allow it. Blessedly, they went out.

Give the reader a chance to understand you. If you don’t understand yourself, well . . . .

Be concise and be concrete, but, as always with things well-done, you must find a way to balance. While you’re writing simply and clearly, you must write creatively. Creativity is not a spiritual gift. One man writes poems for his wife, and one man buys his wife a gift certificate to the spa, and one man offers to do the laundry on their anniversary. This is not an issue of creative versus not creative. It’s more creative and less creative. Everyone, as an image-bearer, has the potential for creativity. Play the hand you’ve been given. If it’s a bad hand, trade a few cards in; cultivate the creativity you have. This is a bigger topic than I can deal with in a few minutes, so I’ll give you a few ideas for the papers you’ll be writing in your classes, and, hopefully, they’ll apply elsewhere.

1. Use imagery. Listen to Thomas Lynch’s description of Milo, a recently departed man (Lynch 13): “Milo had become the idea of himself, a permanent fixture of the third person and past tense, his widow’s loss of appetite and trouble sleeping, the absence in places where we look for him, our habits of him breaking, our phantom limb, our one hand washing the other.”
Instead of telling us what it’s like for Milo to be gone, he shows us using images of what we do when we lose loved ones. They’re familiar images, but they’re unexpected. The most successful imagery is unexpected imagery, the opposite of cliche. This is the way that good metaphor works; it’s a yoking of related but unexpected objects. Surprise your spouse one night and tell her not that you like kissing her, but that she “tastes like sunlight on the walls of [your] mouth” (Neilson Hubbard).

When you use imagery, be consistent. You’ve heard of mixed metaphors; these are bad. Don’t say that Memphis is the armpit of the Bible belt. Memphis is the sweat behind the buckle of the Bible belt.

Be consistent within the individual images, but also be consistent with your imagery throughout the paper. Often, I like to pick one image and use that to control the rest of the paper. For one of my seminary papers, I mentioned my Senior prom, and I used events that happened throughout that night to outline and control the rest of the paper. It makes for interesting reading, and it’s an easy way to start using imagery. If you’ve taken Prep and Del, you’ve heard of expositional rain; it’s the same idea. Let the image rain throughout the rest of the paper. Listen to the Sinaitic (Mt. Sinai) imagery that Wangerin weaves through an account of his grandfather (Miz Lil 11, 13, 17-18): “I had the immediate sense that ‘image’ meant I looked like Grandpa, which flattered me because I loved the old man. The big man. The man with wild white hair like Moses on the mountain and a face as severe as the tablets of stone. It was good to think I looked like Grandpa, an elevation of sorts. . . . Grandpa seldom smiled. He had an eruption of moustache beneath his nose, like white smoke from the chimney pots of his nostrils. His face was mostly expressive of one mood only: solemnity, rectitude, Lutheran doom. His arms were long and strong, his hands huge, his stride unhalting, his whole body an uncompromising dogma. Moses! Grandpa Storck, his hair like cloud at the top of his head, was an immediate Sinai, grim and untender – but I was not intimidated. . . . My grandpa’s prayers lasted longer than mine. My grandpa’s capacities were in every way a wondrous flood, mine but a trickle. No matter. This hard and stolid man, this Moses of the wild white hair, this Lutheran of inflexibilities and spit – he loved me enough for the both of us. I know. I know.” This kind of consistent imagery serves both to make your writing lovelier and more cohesive. Good imagery holds things together.

2. Make use of parallelism. Specifically, use parallelism with sentence length and construction to emphasize a point. For instance, (Lynch191): “In even the best of caskets, it never all fits – all that we’d like to bury in them: the hurt and forgiveness, the anger and pain, the praise and thanksgiving, the emptiness and exaltations, the untidy feelings when someone dies.” He uses noun phrases of similar lengths, and he constructs them the same way (the blank and blank; the blank and blank). Beyond just emphasizing a point, parallelism provides pleasing rhythm; it’s sounds nice to read it aloud. You’ve been told along the way not to repeat words, to find a new word, and you scour the thesaurus and find seven different ways to say something, and none of them means the same thing. Sometimes, it’s best to repeat a word (repetition), especially if it’s the focus of your writing. Hear Bill Bryson speaking of his visit to the Lincoln Memorial (Bryson 120): “The Lincoln Memorial is exactly as you expect it to be. He sits there in his big high chair looking grand and yet kindly. There was a pigeon on his head. There is always a pigeon on his head. I wondered idly if the pigeon thought that all the people who came every day were there to look at him.” Within a span of 18 words, he says “pigeon” 3 times. Isn’t this too repetitive? When you read that, what word sticks in your craw? “Pigeon.” And that’s what he wants, because he wants you to think about the pigeon, especially as he asks the question whether the pigeon thinks we’re thinking about it. Use parallelism and repetition. Use it. Use it.

3. Surprise your reader. Take a common phrasing and turn it on its head. If you’re writing about someone’s face, slip some architecture in there. If you’re writing about someone’s bad teeth, don’t call them “bad” teeth; call them “unfortunate teeth” (Covington 27). Use personification; attribute personal qualities to an impersonal object. If you’re speaking of something solid and fixed like a mountain, speak of it softly and transiently: (Covington 88, 89): “The last motels and hospital were at Grundy, Virginia, a mining town on the lip of a winding river between mountains so steep and irrational, they must have blocked most of the sun most of the day. It is difficult to imagine how children can grow up in such a place without carrying narrowed horizons into the rest of their lives. . . . But Grundy was an oasis compared with the country between it and Jolo. Jim had taken the wheel on that stretch, and I was able to see the landscape for what it was. The topography was like a crumpled sheet of tin. And in that driving rain, at night, the road without guardrails seemed to be a metaphor for our condition. We were barreling down a rain-slick mountain after ten hours solid on the road, and the safe haven at the end of our journey was a place where strangers would be picking up rattlesnakes and drinking strychnine out of mason jars.”

Be concise, be concrete, and be creative. Don’t try and do all of these things at once. You’ll wind up strangling somebody. Maybe me. Try to add one of these elements each time you write a new paper. Notice them as you read. And, after a few years of successful incorporation, you can send me some of your fast-coming royalty checks.

All of the things I’ve discussed belong in a bottle of root beer, the best bottle of root beer: IBC. IBC: Introduction, Body, Conclusion. Forget five paragraphs. Introduce your theme, tell me about it, and let me go. The others have covered this well, so I’ll spare you my full rundown, but I won’t spare you completely..

1. The Introduction

Grab the reader with your first few sentences, if not the first. Give her a reason to keep reading. Listen to the first two lines of an essay by Rebecca Faber: “My throat keeps turning to steel, a metal box. Sometimes I can hardly breathe, it hurts so much.” I want to keep reading. I want to know why. She’s given us the symptom, and I, for one, want to know the cause. Or the first line of Covington’s book: “The first time I went to a snake-handling service, nobody even took a snake out.” He surprises the reader by speaking of an anything-but-ordinary situation in an ordinary manner. For my Marriage and Family paper, I wrote about relationships, and I used one relationship as the controlling image. Instead of saying simply, and blandly, that “this is a paper about relationships,” I decided to open this way: “This is a story about a girl. Or a cry for help. This is a prayer.” Now the professor wants to read. I’ve given him a longing rather than a line, a yearning rather than a yawn. A human has written this.

However long it takes you to creatively present your thesis, your reason for writing, that’s as long as your introduction needs to be. Two lines, two paragraphs, it doesn’t matter.

2. The Body

The body is your explanation, your substantiation of thesis. Three paragraphs or twenty, it doesn’t matter, as long as each paragraph is about one thing, and each paragraph relates to the thesis. Anticipate your reader’s responses and respect them by replying to them; look for the motivations behind facts and data rather than merely presenting them; vary your sentence length, and use length to replace punctuation marks. Be concise and concrete and creative.

3. The Conclusion

You have probably heard somewhere along the way that your paper should be organized this way: “Say what you’re gonna say (introduction), say it (body), and say what you said (conclusion).” This is the perfectionist’s formula for guaranteed coma. When you’ve developed your thesis, and you’re ready to stop, then stop. Don’t tell me what you’ve just said; you just spent the whole body telling me that. Honestly, do you really want me to restate for you everything I’ve said up to this point? It’s like a prayer that never ends, but never really says anything meaningful. Find a way to stop writing. Take the reader by surprise, leave him with a peg to hang his hat on. Don’t add any new material, but don’t simply repeat what you’ve been saying all along. Just end it. Finish it. Don’t insult your reader anymore. Just try to wrap up. Because, really, what’s the point? Who likes that? Really? No one, seriously. I mean, come on; just stop writing.

Finally, two things: prayer and respect. Pray about your papers; not just “Lord, please cancel this assignment,” but specifically. Pray for respect, which means writing honestly, giving the reader and the subject the benefit of the doubt, and willingly saying “I don’t know.” And pray for the reader, for patience and grace.

I’ll let Garrison Keillor shut me up now; this account is, somehow, a metaphor for my writing journey . . . (Keillor, 141): “It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was warm and bright and the trees were in full color, magnificent, explosive, like permanent fireworks – reds and yellows, oranges, some so brilliant that Crayola never put them in crayons for fear the children would color outside the lines. Maple trees the color of illicit romance, blazing red sumac and oaks and aspen, such color that you weren’t sure you were in this world but perhaps had stepped through a seam in the tapestry and walked into a magical wood. But the only trail through there is a cowpath, so you have to watch where you step.”

But these are my opinions. Except for the part about reading good books. That’s the 11th Commandment. Amen.

Generic checklist for writing your paper the way I write mine (ahem)
1. Pray.
2. Make coffee/tea.
3. Pick something meaningful, or find a personal, meaningful slant for an assigned topic.
4. Narrow your topic.
5. Stockpile data and ask questions (interrogate the subject).
6. Formulate a thesis.
7. Make a general outline, incorporating some of the data you’ve gathered.
8. Pray.
9. Fast.
10. Write a rough draft.
11. Seek community.
12. Quit worrying about your grades.
13. Thank me later.

Skimpy Bibliography of Books You Ought to Read or Own at Some Point, Or Do You Care About Your Theological Writing? (In Order of Quasi-Importance, as Deemed by the Oracles, and if You Don’t Have Anyone Better to Ask)

Somewhat Technical Books on Writing
On Writing Well – William Zinsser
Writing With Style – John Trimble

Conversational Books on Writing
Bird By Bird – Anne Lamott
Mystery and Manners – Flannery O’Connor
The Writing Life – Annie Dillard

Creative Nonfiction (Essays)
Teaching a Stone to Talk – Annie Dillard
Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace – Walter Wangerin, Jr.
The John McPhee Reader – John McPhee

Writing References
Strunk and White, 4th ed.
Fowler’s Book of Modern English Usage
The Synonym Finder – J.I. Rodale

Posted by ghetto monk at March 5, 2004 12:30 AM | TrackBack