Several Short Sentences about Writing

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What to expect

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.

Critics Review

  • “A slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm…A careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.”

    Kirkus Reviews

  • “This is a very interesting little book about writing. Modest. Learned. Good-natured. Direct and sympathetic to its readers. You don’t even have to read it front to back (probably you couldn’t, anyway). You can just open it anywhere—as I did—and take away something useful.”

    Richard Ford, New York Times bestselling author

  • “No other book, old or new, is as well reasoned as this, as entertaining or as wise…Best book on writing. Ever.”

    New York Journal of Books

  • “Powerful…Each sentence miraculously contains an idea or insight that lesser writers would have milked for several pages.”

    Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  • “A fresh perspective on writing that goes against conventional classroom theory.”

    Shelf Awareness

  • “Expertise and zeal are required for an established writer to offer genuinely useful guidance to aspiring writers. It also helps if the writer teaches writing, as Klinkenborg has for many years…The result is a unique anatomy of the sentence and the writing mind and a clarifying and invigorating ‘book of first steps.’”

    Booklist

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