Write It Real

A Practical Guide for the Prose Writer

Dan Valenti

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781433192821
• eBook ISBN: 9781433192791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

Write It Real reduces the writing process to its essential core, providing prose writers with pragmatic guides directed solely to improving their words where it matters the most, on the page. This book covers every aspect governing the inside process of producing compelling prose. In doing so, it avoids the abstract and "philosophical" theories of so many writing guides, the nonsense that loses the reader in the layered, labyrinthine maze of grammar and technical excess. Valenti's masterful book focuses instead on the time-tested, practical strategies that produce tangible—and sometimes instant—results.

Write It Real will help writers of all abilities, from developing to the selling pro, refine their work into sparkling clarity, and to do it with renewed confidence that comes from fully understanding how writing works from the inside of creativity out to the reader. This guidebook combines the best of a handbook and a "how to" with insights and strategies refined over decades of the author's prolific career as a journalist, writer, teacher, and speaker.

A passionate take on and an illuminating look at a skill both mysterious and accessible, Write It Real 's 11 chapters take writers through the overlooked (because it's obvious) and the obscure (because it's overlooked). As a prose prescription, this "Rx" is nothing less than the 21st century's answer to Strunk and White's classic, The Elements of Style.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Getting Ready to Write
• Chapter Two: Own Your Words
• Chapter Three: There Is No Such Thing as Writing
• Chapter Four: Write for the Reader, Not Yourself
• Chapter Five: First Draft, Rest, and Revision
• Chapter Six: Writing’s Magic Pill: The Paragraph
• Chapter Seven: Beginning-Middle-Ending
• Chapter Eight: Transitions: Getting from “Here” to “There”
• Chapter Nine: Grammar and Punctuation: Accidence and Analysis
• Chapter Ten: Making Your Case: The Rhetorical Modes of Exposition
• Chapter Eleven: The Last Word
• Index