Easter gift for all you writers
This newsletter aims to empower people and hone their writing skills, from marketing mail shots and webs content to business proposals and books, non-fiction and fiction.
In a series of newsletters I will be working with you to make the most of all your written communication.
After a personal selection of the reference works you need, there will follow: tips on how to write a book, tips on grammar, and features on spiriting authors and writers.
As a writer and editor I have many books and authors who inspire me, from reference works to political and philosophical, to spiritual and practical, to novelists and crime writers.
You can get inspiration without copying and note some of the alternative words for author in the online dictionary/thesaurus.
These include: Wordsmith, novelist, dramatist, playwright, screenwriter, scriptwriter, poet, essayist, biographer, journalist; librettist, lyricist, songwriter.
AND originator, creator, initiator, instigator, founder, father, prime mover, architect, engineer, designer, deviser, planner, inventor, maker, producer.
So you need a wide range of creatives, inventors and wordsmith to help you in the art of writing.
Let’s start with a favourite inspirational quote from Annie Lamott in her marvellous skills guide of writers, Bird by Bird:
Why does writing matter
“Because of the spirit. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen our sense of life; they feed our soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.”
Reference works.
Online dictionary and thesaurus
Stored on my laptop to double-check the meanings of words, to seek alternatives, and to discover the origins. (I also have 4 hardback dictionaries).
Fowler’s Modern English Usage
This debunks some of the pedants’ claims to speak for proper English and ‘correct’ grammar.
Sir Ernest Gowers’ original work dates back to 1926, but is constantly revised. The most recent edition was in 2015.
The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of The English Language Professor David Crystal has written more than 100 books about the English language and I treasure my copy, with the latest third edition from 2018 costing £25 in paperback (and £23 on Kindle!) but well worth the investment.
The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors
448 pages in a small hardback format with recommended spellings, variant forms, confusable words, hyphenation, capitalization*, foreign and specialist terms, proper names, etc.
Doing It In Style
I bought Leslie Sellers’ reference work for journalists when I started as a graduate trainee. It’s out of print but still available on Amazon.
I refer to it from time to time. “At its best,” Sellers writes, “newspaper writing is a model of crispness, clarity, conciseness, and immense readability.”
And that, for me, is what every writer needs to strive for.
Notes: capitalization*: the Oxford use of -ize whereas most people and publications outside the United States use -ise. The rule for spelling styles is to adopt one and stick to it.