Description
The Structure of Writing: A Short How-To Guide to Organize Your Stories, Essays, Reports, and More (The Elements of Writing Book 7)
“The great book of Nature,†Galileo said, “is written in mathematical language and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.â€
You could say the same about writing. Every story, essay, description or analysis needs to take a clear form. Stories usually take the shape of a narrative arc. But you can use other shapes – lines, circles, and triangles – to structure a piece.
The Structure of Writing, Volume 7 in The Writing Code Series, offers a concise how-to guide for managing whole pieces of writing -- from memos to reports, articles to books. Step by step, you will learn how to:
• Make Every Piece a Journey
• Nest Journeys Inside Journeys
• Find the Right Shape
• Label Paragraphs to Chart the Journey
• Yo-Yo To Pace Your Writing
• Use Ones to Highlight Characters, Places, and Issues
• Use Twos to Establish Oppositions and Complements
• Use Threes to Show Dynamism and Complexity
• Use Lists of Four or More to Show Complexity
"The Structure of Writing" offers a number of case studies to illustrate the skills you need to structure your piece, including Maureen Dowd’s coverage of the White House, Andre Agassi’s Open, Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Terrazzo Jungle,†Joe Eszterhas’s Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
Each chapter also offers exercises you can do to master the skills of writing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Euchner is a case writer at Yale University's graduate School of Management and the principal at The Writing Code. Euchner has delivered seminars all across the U.S. and coaches writers and teachers. Euchner spent most of his career in academe, most recently directing a policy think tank at Harvard and teaching writing at Yale.
Euchner is the author of acclaimed books on civil rights (Nobody Turn Me Around), baseball (The Last Nine Innings and Little League, Big Dreams), politics (Extraordinary Politics), urban affairs (Playing the Field and Rethinking Urban Policy," with Steve McGovern), among other works. He has also published with Newsweek, The American, CommonWealth, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and other publications.
