Does your writing need…
Rhythm and bounce in your sentences?
A stronger connection to your characters?
Tenderness in a romantic moment or a violent burst in a fight scene?
Power Charge Your Language teaches not just the techniques for impactful writing but when and how to use them for maximum effect. Tested over the author’s decades-long career and verified by experts, this book will help you uncover the power hidden in your natural written voice. Power Charge Your Language: and Make Your Writing Sing.
Introduction: Becoming a Prose Powerhouse
“A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.”
Gaston Bachelard, Fragment of a Poetics of Fire, 1988
We all dream of sitting down at the computer or putting pen to paper and having beautiful, elegant, breathtaking prose flow onto the page. For most writers it doesn’t happen like that.
In the first book in my Write for Success series, Fast Draft Your Manuscript and Get It Done Now, I make the point that it more important to get words down on the page, no matter how mundane or incorrect, than to fuss over the nuance of every word and never finish.
Not only that, but when you write with abandon, you lose your inner editor and enter the marvelous state of creativity called flow. You will write faster and find that indeed, words do pour onto the paper.
Sometimes they will be great.
Sometimes they will not.
That is why we revise and edit our rough drafts and copyedit our manuscripts until they shine. Giving our prose close attention is part of that process.
So, while many of the ideas presented in this guidebook will be helpful overall in improving your writing, most of the tips and techniques are best used once all the major revision is done, and you are polishing a structurally sound manuscript. See book two in my Write for Success series Revise Your Manuscript and Make It Shine for details on how to structure and revise your rough drafts.
So, don’t worry if your draft is roughly worded, full of cliches, and misused and overused words. All those things can be fixed. In Power Charge Your Language, I am going to show you how.
How to Use This Guide
There is no way a writer can keep all the rules and techniques relating to writing powerful prose in their heads. That is why there are great big thick books like the Chicago Manual of Style (fiction and humanities) and the APA Style Manual (social science and sciences). Copyeditors use similar references.
This book does not cover everything there is to know about prose or stylistic techniques. It does not cover grammar. Instead, I address those writing issues that are most common or that can be improved with a simple tweak, a creative approach, or a tried-and-true literary device. As much as possible, I provide links to helpful and more in-depth resources for those who want to learn more.
The information provided can be used to create more interesting prose no matter how experienced you are as a writer. Nor does it matter what you write. Whether it is an essay, a blog, a marketing release, a scholarly paper, a textbook, or a novel, you will find ideas to spark up your writing.
Hopefully, you will come back again and again to consult this small volume as you put the finishing polish on your manuscript.
For ease of use, I have grouped the techniques into categories based on how they are best used, provided brief Examples, and under the When to Use or How to Fix heading, I list places to apply or address them.
But Power Charge Your Language is more than a list of definitions and examples. At the end of the book, you will find an easy-to-use Power Fix Index, that lists writing problems hot-linked to the topics in this guidebook. So, when you need that magic something to make your prose sing, you will be able to the answer faster than any internet search.
So, let’s get started. Pick up your pen and get set to power charge your prose.
Table of Contents
Introduction Becoming a Prose Powerhouse
Questions to Ask about Power-Charged Words
Questions to Ask about Powering Up Meaning
Chapter 3 Add Power with Sensory Words
Questions to Ask about Sensory Elements
Chapter 4 Create a Powerful Cadence
Questions to Ask about the Rhythm of the Prose
Chapter 5 Build Powerful Sentences & Paragraphs
Questions to Ask about Sentences and Paragraphs
Questions to Ask about the Overall Writing Project
Beyond the Dictionary: Word Resources for Writers
Now Available
Only $2.99 Kindle or Free on Kindle Unlimited
