By Robert Root

A survey of the composing techniques of 7 operating writers—columnist/ essayists Jim Fitzgerald and Kathleen Stocking, political columnists Tom Wicker and Richard Reeves, drama critic Walter Kerr, and movie critics David Denby and Neal Gabler—Working at Writing offers wealthy and specific insights into how writing is basically done.

The e-book has 3 interlocking parts: edited transcripts of interviews with the writers approximately their composing approaches and the composition of particular works, copies of the works mentioned within the transcripts, and a sequence of chapters that learn the interviews and articles within the context of present examine into composing. via this strange constitution, Root investigates either the ways that the operating practices of the seven writers relate to each other and to present versions of composing and the ways that this type of dialogue might be of price to others, quite to scholar writers and their teachers.

By contemplating the reviews of training writers and the examples in their compositions and by way of evaluating the proof of analysis findings with these examples of useful event, Root offers scholar writers—and their lecturers as well—the chance to higher comprehend the paradigms that govern their very own composing and to verify, adjust, abandon, or change them.

The ultimate bankruptcy discusses the consequences of those execs’ event if you happen to desire to turn into operating writers. Stressing the significance of "assiduous stringsaving," immersion in context, typical composition, the rhetorical state of affairs, and the writer’s realizing of his or her personal procedure, Root indicates either what separates the amateur from the professional and the way newcomers can observe the insights of this booklet as they paintings at their very own writing.

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A crazy idea but that's my style . . So I tie in there with the Puffalumps, get a few laughs, at the same time make a point. . " That's reaching pretty far, but that's what I do. The resulting article is one fairly typical of the kind of associations upon which Fitzgerald's columns turn. As he observes, I'm always looking for ironies . . But I am conscious when I get to the end that I've got to button it up . . with the top so it's logical, so people . . can see why these disparate subjects all got in the same column.

Title : Working At Writing : Columnists and Critics Composing author : Root, Robert L. --Authorship, Journalists--United States--Interviews, Critics--United States--Interviews, Journalism--Authorship, Criticism--Authorship, Feature writing. --Authorship, Journalists--United States--Interviews, Critics--United States--Interviews, Journalism--Authorship, Criticism--Authorship, Feature writing. Page iii Working at Writing Columnists and Critics Composing Robert L. Root, Jr. Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville Page iv Copyright © 1991 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Edited by Julie Riley Bush Designed by Edward King Production supervised by Hillside Studio Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Root, Robert L.

Page 10 automaticity rather than mastery) in order to allow attention to focus on one skill at a time. Automaticity is achieved by storage in long term memory (7390). The element of long-term memory in the Flower-Hayes model, then, helps account for aspects of composing that understanding of the rhetoricial problem and conscious attention to writing processes do not. It also helps to account for the kinds of knowledge that a writer needs to draw upon in order to "write like an expert in his profession," which Flower has described as involving four levels of knowing: topic knowledge, discourse or genre knowledge, rhetorical problem solving, and metaknowledge ("Rhetorical Problem Solving" 1314).

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