Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past
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List Price: $14.95 $10.17 $ 4.78 ( 32% ) Da Capo Press William Zinsser
Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 808.06692EAN: 9781569243794ISBN: 1569243794Label: Da Capo PressManufacturer: Da Capo PressNumber Of Items: 1Number Of Pages: 240Publication Date: 2005-03-10Publisher: Da Capo PressStudio: Da Capo Press
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Editorial Reviews: Written with elegance, warmth, and humor, this highly original "teaching memoir" by William Zinsser—renowned bestselling author of On Writing Well gives you the tools to organize and recover your past, and the confidence to believe in your life narrative. His method is to take you on a memoir of his own: 13 chapters in which he recalls dramatic, amusing, and often surprising moments in his long and varied life as a writer, editor, teacher, and traveler. Along the way, Zinsser pauses to explain the technical decisions he made as he wrote about his life. They are the same decisions you'll have to make as you write about your own life: matters of selection, condensation, focus, attitude, voice, and tone.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: First rateComment: Zinsser weaves "how to" tips and discussion into his own memoirs. His section on cutting a broad project (write about baseball) down to manageable size (Pirates in spring training) is excellent for its step-by-step thinking process. He offers equally good thinking on many other things that can cause perplexion.
Customer Rating: Summary: a wonderfully smart toolComment: If one is interested in learning how to write about ones' life (memories) this book is fantastic. Its both interesting and informitive. I really enjoy it and I'm hard to please.Customer Rating: Summary: Won't Learn Much From Reading ThisComment: This book is a bunch of introspection. While he may be telling some interesting stories, the book will not teach you how to write a memoir or anything else for that matter. I have three master's degrees and a BA in English. Getting none of those degrees taught me to write. You learn to write from imitating good writing. If you want to be a writer, then read good writing of the type you'd like to write. I've found a few of technique books to be useful: The First Five Pages, Technique in Fiction, and Self-Editing for Fiction writers. Reading while writing helps a great deal. And reading as a writer helps. Also, developing control over sentence structure is a must, along with your imagination and mature insights.Customer Rating: Summary: Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the PastComment: William Zinsser is the premiere writing coach of our day!Customer Rating: Summary: Great, but not so great...Comment: No doubt Zinsser knows how to teach writing, but I'm amazed over the gap between his writing principles and the style with which he writes about his own life. Such a small portion of the book teaches how to write well while the greater amount is devoted to example. When Zinsser writes about his own life, I can hardly stand reading it anymore because it is so boring. At first I thought his life was going to be fascinating to read about since he has done so much. However, he seems to have mastered the art of taking something with so much potential and turning it into material too dry and stale to enjoy. What this book has taught me is that I'd rather read an entertaining story written with bad grammar and spelling any day over something an English teach would give an A+ on which will put you to sleep. Sorry Zinsser for such harsh critism, but I know English teachers...they aren't too sparing on critism either.
