Arthur Plotnik is a former publishing executive and author of the Book of the Month Club selections The Elements of Editing and The Elements of Expression: Putting Thoughts into Words.
Billy Collins, former American Poet Laureate
A must for every writer's desk.
Richard Lederer, co-author of The Write Way and Comma Sense
...Plotnik not only knows how to write about spunk and bite. He
writes with spunk and bite. So will you, if you take in the wisdom
of his colorful, learned, and caring advice.
Andrea J. Sutcliffe, editor, The New York Public Library Writer's
Guide to Style and Usage
Spunk & Bite belongs next to Strunk and White on every writer's
desk.
Poynter Online - (Chip Scanlan, “Chip on Your Shoulder”), March 6,
2006
Instead of rules, Spunk & Bite offers choices bolstered with
real-world examples. . . . Plotnik . . . zooms in close, helping
writers deconstruct their prose from the ground floor -- word to
clause to sentence -- up to paragraphs and chapters to our Holy
Grail, a finished piece of writing. . . . Unlike Strunk & White's
catalogue of abstractions and rhetorical ruler slaps, Plotnik's
Spunk & Bite is refreshingly concrete. Its author know his
linguistic stuff and so can you.
College and Research Library News - March 2006 (George
Eberhart)
[A] bookful of remedies for literary listlessness, sprinkled with
examples of ringing prose penned by wordsmiths from Poe to Proulx.
Plotnik rips past the rigid rules of Strunk and White’s 1959
Elements of Style and calls on writers to invigorate stodgy
phrasings and pallid diction with freshness, texture, force, and
form. Each chapter contains apt advice on what to avoid (actionless
action, wandering modifiers, exhausted adverbs) and what to emulate
(over-the-top tropes, killer megaphors, enallage, foreignisms,
nuanced semicolons, edgy style). An energetic and entertaining read
for cramped writers.
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