Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs

Want to write more powerfully? You've come to the right book. "Word Up!"--an eclectic collection of essays, more inspiration guide than style guide--serves up tips and insights for anyone who wants to write with more umph. "Word Up!" does what too few writing books do: it practices while preaching, shows while telling, uses powerful writing to talk about powerful writing. "Word Up!" explores the perplexities and celebrates the pleasures of the English language. It leaves you smiling--and ready to conquer your next blank (or blah) page.

Even the best writers want to know how to write more powerfully. You may write blog posts, e-books, e-mails, executive summaries, e-zine articles, hospital-hallway signs, presentations, proposals, lab reports, letters to the editor, love letters, lunch-bag notes, movie reviews, news stories, novels, online help, plays, poems, proposals, recipes, reference manuals, scholarly critiques, speeches, term papers, tweets, user-interface text, video scripts, web pages, or white papers. You may write for a million readers or for one. You may use a pen, a typewriter, a wiki, or an XML authoring tool. You may be a grammar snob, or you may think that "grammar snobs are great big meanies." You may write because something within you says you can't not write--or because your boss says you can't not write. No matter what you write, or how or why, you and every other writer have two things in common: you use words, and you want someone to want to read them. How do you get people to want to read your words? Know your subject. Know your audience. And write powerfully. This book can help you write powerfully.

When Marcia was twelve, "American Girl" magazine printed her eight-paragraph story, "The Key," and paid her $15. She has been writing ever since. To share her love of writing, she has collected some one-of-a-kind essays into a book: "Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything You Build from Them)." At Lake Forest College, she wrote one-act plays that were performed on the campus stage, learned from, and buried. She studied under Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff in the Syracuse University creative-writing program. She taught technical writing in the Engineering School at Cornell University. She has done writing of all kinds for organizations of all kinds, from the Fortune 500 to the just plain fortunate. Marcia has written for the scholarly journal "Shakespeare Quarterly," the professional journal "Technical Communication," the weekly newspaper "Syracuse New Times," and that user guide you used last week and didn't swear at. She used to write letters by the boxful. She has contributed posts to her daughter's Peace Corps blog, texts to her son's Droid, and answers to her husband's crossword puzzles. Her words have landed on billboards, blackboards, birthday cakes, boxes of eggs, and the back of her book. She lives in Portland, Oregon.