Write for Your Life: A Guide to Clear and Purposeful Writing (and Presentations)
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The best-selling author’s practical guide to writing clearly and convincingly in every professional setting.
How would you create a winning pitch for your latest investment idea? Or persuasively argue for a major policy change? Or successfully ask your boss for a raise? The answer: clear and effective communication, whether in writing or through a presentation.
Best-selling author Charles Wheelan has spent decades mastering effective communication skills in his work as a writer, college professor, journalist, speechwriter, political candidate, and public speaker. In Write for Your Life, he shares his best tips. Taking readers through all the steps required to arrive at a coherent first draft, he then explains the best ways to improve and fine-tune your writing. He covers how to organize and present information, why it’s necessary to adapt your tone to different audiences, and when to use summaries, sidebars, bullet points, and other tools for making information more digestible. He explores the truth behind popular clichés like "Show, don’t tell" and "Kill your darlings," and discusses the proper use and attribution of quotations from secondary sources. And he goes on to cover how to speak effectively, providing helpful advice for preparing a winning presentation or delivering a speech.
Writing with his signature wit and humor, Wheelan illustrates his points with entertaining examples from his own life, as well as memorable anecdotes from leading magazine and newspaper writers, political figures from Winston Churchill to Barack Obama and Elena Kagan, and a diverse array of the best communicators from the worlds of culture, sports, and politics. Write for Your Life is an essential guide for anyone needing to get their ideas across whether in an email, memo, report, presentation, fund-raising letter, or speech.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Whatever you do, good writing will help," advises journalist Wheelan (Naked Economics) in this muddled guide. Learning to write, Wheelan posits, is fundamental to all areas of life, and clear communication can smooth out everyday exchanges. In chapters that cover "Getting Started," "Making It Better," and "Buffing and Polishing," Wheelan offers writing rules that, for the most part, rely on the familiar: cut superfluous language, create an outline, and use descriptive language, or, as he puts it, "show, don't tell." He goes beyond the page in a middling chapter on speech delivery: "practice," he suggests, and "decide if you want to take questions, and if so, how you'll take them." Along the way, Wheelan references Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" as a showcase for the power of communication, and the movie The Hangover as an example of deciding on a "narrative structure." Throughout, asides on topics such as sports, Chicago politics, and criticisms of his past students appear, though they tend to mostly clutter things up. With so many writing guides out there, this one doesn't do enough to separate itself from the pack.
