Mary Ylvisaker Nilsen

Words that Sing Mary Ylvisaker Nilsen

Both text and inspiration, both craft and art, Words that Sing offers to serious writers, writers who are struggling to be heard, who want to hone their craft, who long to write more artful prose, specific techniques for doing so. Whether studied alone, in a workshop setting, or in a college classroom, these techniques and exercises heighten writers' awareness of issues of craft and give specific helps in learning stylistic forms of sentences that increase the power of their words. Beyond that, the exercises explore the fundamental importance of communicating ideas through metaphor. Specific exercises increase a writer's ability to convey ideas that matter by using language that lingers and perhaps even takes up residence in the reader's mind. "Moving from balances to series, from cumulatives to suspensions, and working with increasingly sophisticated forms of metaphor, the course challenges writers to stretch their stylistic repertoire, to expand their view of sentences, and to see the world as they have not seen it before. If you hope to increase the gracefulness, the artfulness and the power of your prose, or want your students to do likewise, this course is for you. If you believe that sentences carefully wrought can touch a reader's heart and lift a reader's spirit, then Mary Nilsen had you in mind when she wrote this book." Dr. Nancy Jones (from the back cover). Words that Sing can be used as a text for semester-long writing classes or for shorter, intensive workshops. This second edition reflects recent scholarship into the role metaphor plays in the way we think and reason.