Offers advice on improving writing skills and promoting a style marked by simplicity, orderliness, and sincerity.

A widely admired writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg now gives us a distillation of that experience in an distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means for them to be writing. Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. Here he sets out to help us unlearn that "wisdom"--about...

"Learn the art of argument from the masters. Here is a curated collection, with hundreds of examples, of reasoning and debate from the golden age of debate in England and America. Leave it to Farnsworth to illuminate principles of debate through examples by masters of the language. Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Winston Churchill, and many others, each provide exemplars of reasoning, persuasion, and aggression. From "Insult...

Who would we be without stories? Stories mold who we are, from our character to our cultural identity. They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions, and shape our politics and beliefs. We use them to construct our relationships, to keep order in our law courts, to interpret events in our newspapers and social media. Storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human. There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story from...

"25 Great Sentences and How They Got That Way is for word lovers, readers interested in encountering new authors or revisiting favorite works, and aspiring writers. The author, a master English teacher at Horace Mann for several decades, leads readers on a delightful tour of sentences by authors in the canon, using deft analysis and humor to "look under the hood" and allow us to see what makes a sentence great"-- Provided by publisher.

Lectures by Dr. David Zarefsky, Northwestern University, covering the history of rhetoric and debate and analyzing different types of arguments in various situations

Presents advice on writing a college application essay, with commentary from college admission officers and more than fifty examples of essays from successful applicants, with an analysis on the strengths and weaknesses of each essay.