Several Short Sentences About Writing

Most of what you think you know about writing is useless. It’s the harmful debris of your education—a mixture of half-truths, myths, and false assumptions that prevents you from writing well. Drawing on years of experience as a writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg offers an approach to writing that will change the way you work and think. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. What you’ll find here isn’t the way to write. Instead, you’ll find a way to clear your mind of illusions about writing and discover how __you__ write. Several Short Sentences About Writing is a book of first steps and experiments. They will revolutionize the way you think and perceive, and they will change forever the sense of your own authority as a writer. This is a book full of learning, but it’s also a book full of unlearning—a way to recover the vivid, rhythmic, poetic sense of language you once possessed. An indispensable and unique book that will give you a clear understanding of how to think about what you do when you write and how to improve the quality of your writing. 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 genius, about creativity, about writer's block, topic sentences, and outline--and understand that writing is just as much about thinking, noticing, and learning what it means to be involved in the act of writing. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. Instead, it is a gathering of starting points in a journey toward lively, lucid, satisfying self-expression.--From publisher description