Title: Spunk & bite : a writer's guide to punchier, more engaging language & style /
Authors: Plotnik, Arthur
Publisher: Random House Reference,
Year: 2005
Subjects: Authorship.; English language Rhetoric; English language Style
Abstract: Presents a comprehensive guide to creating winning manuscripts that will sell, and provide tips and techniques on language, dialogue, diction and more.
Contents: Flexibility : a little light unstrunktion -- 1. E.B. Whitewashed : a starting point -- Freshness : the wallop of the new -- 2. The pleasures of surprise -- 3. Extreme expression -- 4. Writers' words, drop by dottle -- 5. Upgrading your colors -- 6. Joltingly fresh adverbs -- Texture : writing into the mood -- 7. Tense : a sticky choice -- 8. Diction : we are the words -- 9. The punchy trope -- Word : language, aerobatic and incandescent -- 10. How to loot a thesaurus -- 11. Words with music and sploosh -- 12. Coining the bonne locution -- 13. Words with foreign umami -- Force : stimulation by any means -- 14. Dialogue tags with oomph -- 15. Enallage : a fun grammatical get -- 16. Intensifiers for the feeble -- 17. Opening words : the glorious portal -- 18. Closings : the three-point landing -- Form : life between the marks -- 19. The joys of hyper-hyphenation -- 20. A license. To fragment. Sentences -- 21. The poetry lists -- 22. The art of the semicolon -- 23. Daringly quoteless dialogue -- Clarity : "a house of great spickness and spanness" -- 24. The feng shui of writing -- 25. Hunting down danglers -- 26. Magic in the names of things -- 27. The earnestly engaging sentence -- Contemporaneity : a leg up on the competition -- 28. Writing for new generations -- 29. Hot pop and ephemeragy -- 30. Edge : writing at the nervy limits -- 31. Parting words : butterflies in the killing fields.