Writing as Craft and Magic


Book Description

Writing as Craft and Magic, Second Edition, outlines a compelling approach to conceiving, reporting, organizing, and writing articles for today's media. The book revolves around the central idea that writers improve most quickly by combining the powers of technique ("craft") with creativity ("magic"). Applying this method to news and feature writing--both print and online--it focuses on leads, organization, transition, clarity, drama, and other elements that drive good writing toward excellence. Aimed at students in upper-level undergraduate writing and reporting courses, Writing as Craft and Magic provides a clear and succinct instructional system--with practical models, a wealth of examples, and step-by-step guides--to help students understand and apply craft and magic to daily assignments. Author Carl Sessions Stepp, a seasoned journalist at the national level, structures his system in three parts. He first evokes the art of writing, then applies that art to standard journalistic writing, and concludes with a strong section on advanced writing techniques for features. He also offers advice and tips on how newsrooms currently operate in the age of multimedia journalism. This revised edition includes an expanded exercise section at the end of each chapter, more coverage of the demands of multimedia journalism (convergence), and updated chapters on incorporating the Internet into research and writing for the daily news cycle.




The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults


Book Description

This master class in writing children’s and young adult novels will teach you everything you need to know to write and publish a great book. The best children’s and young adult novels take readers on wonderful outward adventures and stirring inward journeys. In The Magic Words, editor Cheryl B. Klein guides writers on an enjoyable and practical-minded voyage of their own, from developing a saleable premise for a novel to finding a dream agent. She delves deep into the major elements of fiction—intention, character, plot, and voice—while addressing important topics like diversity, world-building, and the differences between middle-grade and YA novels. In addition, the book’s exercises, questions, and straightforward rules of thumb help writers apply these insights to their own creative works. With its generous tone and useful tools for story analysis and revision, The Magic Words is an essential handbook for writers of children’s and young adult fiction.




Writing Is Magic, Or Is It? Using Mentor Texts to Develop the Writer's Craft


Book Description

Students must study what accomplished authors have written and practice the styles, approaches, or methods they employ in order to become proficient writers. The practical, standards-based book dives deeply into the genres of poetry, narrative fiction, narrative nonfiction, informative/explanatory, and opinion/argument. Using close reading of mentor texts, analysis of specific writing strategies in those texts, and the application of those strategies in the student's own writing, students will be equipped for any type of writing.




Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing


Book Description

Responding to recent powerful arguments that theory has only a limited role in the field, teachers of composition suggest to their colleagues how they can, and why they should, teach from a theoretical stance developed from their own experience. The ten essays focus on the process of knowing, the historical and social context, and mechanisms of teaching. Paper edition (1947-0), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Craft Your Own Magic


Book Description

A call to create your own magical practice by understanding magical correspondences, incorporating your own lived experiences and ancestry, and applying intuitive insights. Crafting your own magic is a personal and fluid journey, and you won’t find scripted spells and rituals within these pages. Instead, you’ll find a collection of pathways to a magical practice rooted in your lived experience and the relationships you form in seen and unseen realms. Here, witch, intuitive energy healer, and death-worker Cassie Uhl will share techniques to hone your inherent intuitive abilities, personal experiences, and practices—all of which she encourages you to modify to suit your needs. Your magical practice and the path that shapes it will be as unique as you are, as it should be. Uhl walks you through crafting your own magic using the elements as guideposts: air, on developing intuition; fire, on magic in relationship; water, on correspondences; earth, on ethics and ancestry; and spirit, on bringing it all together. What crafting your own magic looks like for you will be personal and fluid. Where would you turn to seek inspiration, community, means, and modes to craft your magic? Perhaps you would shift inward to the trees, flowers, birds, or invisible in-between spaces. There will likely be parts of your magical practice that no one but you will be able to define as true. For these reasons, parts of crafting your own magic may feel uncomfortable. From these places of discomfort, not knowing, and becoming, your magical practices can flourish.




A Writer's Craft


Book Description

This introductory creative writing text uses a unique, multi-genre approach to provide students with a broad-based knowledge of their craft, treating them as professional writers. Beginning by discussing elements common to all genres, this book underscores the importance of learning good writing habits before committing to a genre, encouraging writers to look beyond their genre expectations and learn from other forms. The book then devotes one chapter to each of the major literary genres: fiction, poetry, drama and creative nonfiction. These style-specific sections provide depth as they compare the different genres, furnishing students with a comprehensive understanding of creative writing as a discipline and fostering creativity. The discussion concludes with a chapter on digital media and an appendix on literary citizenship and publishing. With exercises at the end of each chapter, a glossary of literary terms, and a list of resources for further study, A Writer's Craft is the ideal companion to an introductory creative writing class. It has been listed as one of the 'Best Books for Writers' by Poets and Writers magazine.




The Writer's Craft


Book Description




Models for Teaching Writing-Craft Target Skills (Second Edition)


Book Description

For Multiple Grades Models for Teaching Writing-craft Target Skills is your go-to guide for writing-craft instruction through exemplary and accessible literature models. Writing-craft Target Skills--those specific techniques that all good writers use to effectively craft clear and compelling fiction and non-fiction--are best taught through explicit modeling. Locating the appropriate mentor texts for every skill, however, can be a daunting and time-consuming task. This innovative resource puts more than 450 valuable literature models at your fingertips and matches them to thirty-three fundamental writing-craft Target Skills. To add variety and versatility to your K-8 writing classroom, Models for Teaching Writing-craft Target Skills includes a wide assortment of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry selections, ranging from picture books to intermediate texts. This revised and updated second edition also includes more than seventy Spanish literature models that are ideal for ESL/ELL writing-craft instruction. Save yourself time and energy by referencing four literature-model matrices, which alphabetically list fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and Spanish-text models. Each genre-specific matrix identifies multiple writing-craft skills so you can easily reference how to use many of the models to teach a variety of writing techniques. Models for Teaching Writing-craft Target Skills: Helps you fully utilize the strong connection between reading and writing; Increases the power of modeling in your writing-workshop lessons; Pre-selects and organizes a set of appropriate literature models to help you teach writing craft effectively; and Features Spanish literature models for teaching writing-craft skills to ESL/ELL students.







Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative Writing


Book Description

Craft lives inside the artist, and it operates in the mind, not in standards or techniques. Creative writers navigate thresholds in consciousness as they develop their arts practice. Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative Writing explores what it is to be an artist as it traces radical, feminist, and culturally embedded traditions in craft. The new term "craft consciousness" identifies the nexus from which writers explore making processes and practitioner knowledge. Writers, as with all artists, create and reimagine themselves anew, and it is in this perpetual state of becoming that they find ways to enlarge their sense of artistry through an exploration of forms, processes, and mediums beyond the written word. For writers, this book initiates a reexamination of the mission of creative writing through disrupting patriarchal, racist, colonialist, ableist, and capitalist associations with dominant craft. Drawing from twenty-five interviews with living artists outside of writing and in a host of fields from conceptual art to leatherwork and dance, the book shines a light on how the processes associated with craft are embodied. Craft is an internalized matrix; it need not be commodified for the marketplace or codified in the standards necessitated by institutions of higher education. By redesigning writing workshops and MFA/PhD programs through craft consciousness, new potentials and collaborations emerge, and it becomes more conceivable to imagine dynamic, inclusive relationships between writers, scientists, and other artists.




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