Top Highlights

• participles—
• Mansfield is one of those stylists whose work you can open anywhere to discover some inspired word choice.
• And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out—don’t tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams “yay” and jumps up and down for joy—when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. There are many occasi...
• Rather, they are the results of conscious, careful deliberations of writers who thought a thousand times before they purposely misused a word, or gave another word a new meaning.
• Having read the ballroom scene in Anna Karenina, or the wild party that winds through so many pages of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, you have sources to which you can go not just for inspiration but for technical assistance.