Quotes from Roy Peter Clark

Capitals are called uppercase letters because typesetters would store them in the "upper case." Small letters were kept in the "lower case.

Who has something at stake here?

exemplification.

aesthetic experience

cosmic benevolence.

knowledge of our own mortality

That's the writing tool: use passive verbs to call attention to the receiver of the action.

There can be no arguing about matters of taste. I

The question mark, used well, may be the most profoundly human form of punctuation. Unlike the other marks, the question mark—except perhaps when used in a rhetorical question—imagines the Other. It envisions communication not as assertive but as interactive, even conversational.

Now, I must give him credit for this," said Wolfe. "If you ever have a preposterous statement to make… say it in five words or less, because we're always used to five-word sentences as being the gospel truth." The

Open this book to a random page. With a pencil, mark any word or phrase that you think does not contribute to the meaning of a passage or chapter. 2. Pick another page. As an exercise, imagine that you have been assigned to cut 10 percent. Mark the candidates for deletion.

Who becomes Character. What becomes Action. (What happened.) Where becomes Setting. When becomes Chronology. Why becomes Cause or Motive. How becomes Process. (How it happened.)

Good readers may struggle with a difficult text, but struggle is not the goal of reading. The goal is fluency. Meaning flows to the good reader. In the same way, writing should flow from the good writer, at least as an ideal. The

The ability to read, society tells us, contributes to success in education, employment, and citizenship. Reading is a democratic craft. Writing, in contrast, is considered a fine art.

the act of writing will make you a better student, a better worker, a better friend, a better citizen, a better parent, a better teacher, a better person. I

If you goal is to achieve precision and concision, begin by pruning the big limbs. You can shake out the dead leaves later.

If you want to write, here's a secret: the writer's struggle is overrated, a con game, a cognitive distortion, a self-fulfilling prophecy, the best excuse for not writing. "Why should I get writer's block?" asked the mischievous Roger Simon. "My father never got truck driver's block.

Some teachers refer to this as the 2-3-1 tool of emphasis, where the most emphatic words or images go at the end, the next most emphatic at the beginning, and the least emphatic in the middle, but that's too much calculus for my brain. Here's my simplified version: put your best stuff near the beginning and at the end; hide weaker stuff in the middle. Amy

battle the clock with a set of focusing questions: Why does the story matter? What's the point? Why is the story being told? What does the story say about life, the world, the times we live in?

A Writer's Reference

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

100 Ways to Improve Your Writing

Modern English Usage

Obscure words should be defined in texts or made clear from context. But the reading vocabulary of the average citizen is larger than the writing vocabulary of the typical author.