Billy Collins, former American Poet Laureate
A must for every writer’s desk.
Richard Lederer, co-author of The Write Way and Comma Sense
…Plotnik not only knows how to write about spunk and bite. He writes with spunk and bite. So will you, if you take in the wisdom of his colorful, learned, and caring advice.
Andrea J. Sutcliffe, editor, The New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage
Spunk & Bite belongs next to Strunk and White on every writer’s desk.
Poynter Online – (Chip Scanlan, “Chip on Your Shoulder”), March 6, 2006
Instead of rules, Spunk & Bite offers choices bolstered with real-world examples. . . . Plotnik . . . zooms in close, helping writers deconstruct their prose from the ground floor — word to clause to sentence — up to paragraphs and chapters to our Holy Grail, a finished piece of writing. . . . Unlike Strunk & White’s catalogue of abstractions and rhetorical ruler slaps, Plotnik’s Spunk & Bite is refreshingly concrete. Its author know his linguistic stuff and so can you.
College and Research Library News – March 2006 (George Eberhart)
[A] bookful of remedies for literary listlessness, sprinkled with examples of ringing prose penned by wordsmiths from Poe to Proulx. Plotnik rips past the rigid rules of Strunk and White’s 1959 Elements of Style and calls on writers to invigorate stodgy phrasings and pallid diction with freshness, texture, force, and form. Each chapter contains apt advice on what to avoid (actionless action, wandering modifiers, exhausted adverbs) and what to emulate (over-the-top tropes, killer megaphors, enallage, foreignisms, nuanced semicolons, edgy style). An energetic and entertaining read for cramped writers.
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