Learn To Write Badly

Download or read book Learn to Write Badly written by Michael Billig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-20 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern academia is increasingly competitive yet the writing style of social scientists is routinely poor and continues to deteriorate. Are social science postgraduates being taught to write poorly? What conditions adversely affect the way they write? And which linguistic features contribute towards this bad writing? Michael Billig's witty and entertaining book analyses these questions in a quest to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong with the way social scientists write. Using examples from diverse fields such as linguistics, sociology and experimental social psychology, Billig shows how technical terminology is regularly less precise than simpler language. He demonstrates that there are linguistic problems with the noun-based terminology that social scientists habitually use - 'reification' or 'nominalization' rather than the corresponding verbs 'reify' or 'nominalize'. According to Billig, social scientists not only use their terminology to exaggerate and to conceal, but also to promote themselves and their work.

Download or read book 100 Ways to Write Badly Well written by Joel Stickley and published by Pan. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "His use of language, his ability to twist the narrative and turn the obscure into the profound is outstanding." – The Stage Looking for a creative writing guide out there that will tell you how to write better? A book to tell you how to structure a perfect plot, create great characters, use language in a powerful and poetic way? This is not that book. 100 Ways to Write Badly Well is an adventure in drivel. It will teach you how to botch a plot, how to create characters that no one in their right mind would identify with and how to reduce the beauty of the English language to an incoherent mush. Using one hundred practical examples, each awful in its own unique way, blogger and creative writing tutor Joel Stickley will lead you methodically up the creek and carefully remove your paddle before running off and leaving you stranded. The route is lined with mixed metaphors, terrible plot twists, piles of adjectives and characters staring at themselves in mirrors for no apparent reason. Based on the popular blog and live comedy show How To Write Badly Well, this book is an invaluable guide to the art of awful writing that no would-be author should be without. Remember – if a thing's worth doing badly, it's worth doing badly well.

Download or read book Books Burn Badly written by Manuel Rivas and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-02-18 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 19 August 1936 Hercules the boxer stands on the quayside at Coruña and watches Fascist soldiers piling up books and setting them alight. With this moment a young carefree group of friends are transformed into a broken generation. Out of this incident during the early months of Spain's tragic civil war, Manuel Rivas weaves a colourful tapestry of stories and unforgettable characters to create a panorama of twentieth-century Spanish history. For it is not only the lives of Hercules the boxer and his friends that are tainted by the unending conflict, but also those of a young washerwoman who sees souls in the clouded river water and the stammering son of a judge who uncovers his father's hidden library. As the singed pages fly away on the breeze, their stories live on in the minds of their readers.

Download or read book The Eye of Argon written by Jim Theis and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is not a hoax. Jim Theis was a real person, who wrote The Eye of Argon in all seriousness as a teenager, and published it in a fanzine, Osfan in 1970. But the story did not pass into the oblivion that awaits most amateur fiction. Instead, a miracle happened, and transcribed and photocopied texts began to circulate in science fiction circles, gaining a wide and incredulous audience among both professionals and fans. It became the ultimate samizdat, an underground classic, and for more than thirty years it has been the subject of midnight readings at conventions, as thousands have come to appreciate the negative genius of this amazing Ed Wood of prose.

Download or read book We're Gonna Die written by Young Jean Lee and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2015 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A life-affirming, humorous show of songs and monologues drawing on real-life experiences, about the one thing we all have in common: we're gonna die. You may be miserable, but you won't be alone. Witty, wise and honest, We're Gonna Die narrates Lee's experiences of loneliness and the comfort she found in simple and unexpected things following the death of her father. This book includes a CD of all six songs (performed by Young Jean Lee with her band Future Wife) and eight monologues (performed by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Kathleen Hanna, Adam Horovitz, Matmos's Drew Daniel, and Martin Schmidt, Sarah Neufeld, and Colin Stetson).

Download or read book The Accidents of Style written by Charles Harrington Elster and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-07-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fasten your seat belt for a crash course in careful usage.... Just like automobile accidents, accidents of style occur all over the English-speaking world, in print and on the Internet, thousands of times every day. They range from minor fender benders, such as confusing their and there, to serious smashups, such as misusing sensual for sensuous or writing loathe when you mean loath. Charles Harrington Elster shows you how to navigate the hairpin turns of grammar, diction, spelling, and punctuation with an entertaining driver's manual covering 350 common word hazards and infractions, arranged in order of complexity for writers of all levels. Elster illustrates these surprisingly common accidents with quotations from numerous print and online publications, many of them highly regarded---which perhaps should make us feel better: If the horrendous redundancy closeproximity and the odious construction what it is, is have appeared in The New York Times, maybe our own accidents will be forgiven. But that shouldn't keep us from aspiring to accident-free writing and speaking. If you want to get on the road to writing well, The Accidents of Style will help you drive home what you want to say.

Download or read book Immediate Fiction written by Jerry Cleaver and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2004-12-03 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the entire process from story building to manuscript preparation and marketing, Jerry Cleaver shows the novice and experienced writer how to start writing and how to get immediate results. Readers will find everything they need to know about managing time, finding an idea, getting the first word down on the page, staying unblocked, shaping ideas into compelling stories, and submitting their work to agents and publishers. Immediate Fiction goes beyond the old "Write what you know" to "Write what you can imagine." Filled with insightful tips on how to manage doubts, fears, blocks, and panic, Immediate Fiction will help writers develop their skills in as little minutes a day, if necessary. Believing that all writing is rewriting, Cleaver says, "You can't control what you put on the page. You can only control what you leave on the page." With this book Cleaver shows how to get that control and produce results.