GER 150W: Topics in German Studies: Writing

Now in its fifth edition, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature has become both a standard introduction to the close reading of literature and an invaluable resource for English graduate students. It offers students and other readers a variety of ways to interpret a piece of literature, ranging from historical/biographical and moral/philosophical approaches through the formalist, the psychological, the mythic and archetypal, and into such contemporary perspectives as feminist criticism and cultural studies.

The How to Write series aims to give students a recipe of sorts for creating excellent creative and academic prose and poetry. Each book is constructed as a set of instructions that are meant to illuminate the writing process, eliminating the mystery that so many other books seem to celebrate. Our belief is that writing well is a skill all students can learn, if they have the right guidance along the way.

How to Write Persuasively Today is an authoritative handbook for getting your point across, a step-by-step how-to guide for making sure you say what you mean in the clearest, most effective way possible. Drawing on over three decades of professional writing and speaking experience, author Carolyn Davis breaks down the challenges, issues, and potential pitfalls involved in persuasive writing, providing practical strategies and solutions for communicating with the utmost clarity, precision, force, and style. It is a presentation filled with vivid, often humorous real-life examples of writing and presentations of all kinds-one that also equips readers with the tools needed to assess and evaluate everything from advertising claims to political propaganda to survey results.

Good Prose--like Strunk and White's The Elements of Style--is a succinct, authoritative, and entertaining arbiter of standards in contemporary writing, offering guidance for the professional writer and the beginner alike. This wise and useful book is the perfect companion for anyone who loves to read good books and longs to write one.

It explores three major nonfiction forms: narratives, essays, and memoirs. Kidder and Todd draw candidly, sometimes comically, on their own experience--their mistakes as well as accomplishments--to demonstrate the pragmatic ways in which creative problems get solved.