By Patricia T. O'Conner

And never a minute too quickly! Armed with our laptops and our computers, we are the writing-est new release ever, cranking out email, websites, digital bulletin board postings, let alone workplace memos, faxes, studies, newsletters, college papers, even memoirs and novels. yet many folks have been by no means taught easy methods to write a sentence that is sensible, the right way to make certain our phrases do justice to our rules. the outcome? by no means have such a lot of written rather a lot so badly. Patricia T. O'Conner involves the rescue with phrases Fail Me, a pragmatic and witty consultant to the weather of excellent writing. She takes you thru the writing technique step-by-step. Pat O'Conner has performed it back. So, there will be not more staring blankly at an empty reveal. phrases Fail Me will allure the nice author out of you.

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It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. " (The Memoirs of Richard Nixon) Memorable writing doesn't always start with a wow. Some of the novels I've most enjoyed lure the reader in more slowly: Howards End, Women in Love, Hotel du Lac, The Death of the Heart, The Sheltering Sky, Excellent Women, not to mention scores of nineteenth-century classics. But the leisurely beginning takes a kind of genius that most of us don't have and a kind of patience that most readers don't have, either.

I watched her move off. Her hands suddenly appeared behind her. She caught the bottom of her suit between thumb and index finger and flicked what flesh had been showing back where it belonged. " You can almost feel the temperature rise. Who wouldn't keep reading? Getting Physical When a summary or an anecdote doesn't seem quite right, try a physical description of whatever you're writing about, whether a difficult client, the crime scene in a whodunit, or an archaeological dig. Ernest Hemingway was especially good at this kind of beginning.

And keep the cards in the same spot, so that reaching for them becomes automatic. Once you've made a note—whether on a file card, a page torn from a notebook, or a slip of paper—store it in a handy place. This is your stash. Just as a farmer has seed and a carpenter has lumber, a writer keeps a stash of material—promising words or phrases, news clippings, or idle notions. The way you organize your stash depends on your personality. If you're one of those systematic types—all right, admit it—you might use an accordion file, with related notes neatly sorted by subject.

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