Words skillfully guides you, step by step, through your entire writing project. Written in a conversational style, Words explains how to shape, focus, organize, and polish your nonfiction writing. It coaches you through the process of discovering what you want to say, how you want to say it, and how you convey your ideas with precision, clarity, and confidence. Words is for born writers, aspiring writers, and for people who have writing thrust upon them. If you are a student, Words provides a step by step approach to writing that works across disciplines and will serve you well throughout your academic and professional career. If you write books, proposals, essays, memos, reports, blogs, manuals, presentations, memoirs, articles, journals, speeches, or creative nonfiction, Words is the book for you. Overview Section A, Knowing What You Want To Say, presents practical strategies for discovering your key word and your key idea, generating a title, and connecting with your audience. Thoughtful writing begins with a single word, a specific goal, and a well-defined audience. Section B, Knowing How To Say It, provides realistic techniques for writing your introduction, creating a shared context, conducting a guided tour of your ideas, and creating a satisfying ending. We all see the world through a slightly different lens because of our individual experiences and expectations. Writing is successful when readers see the world through your lens. Section C, Editing, offers common sense guidelines for editing your work and writing concise, confident, and credible sentences. It explains how the misuse of verbs is the leading cause of wordiness and how wordiness is the leading cause of poor writing. It also explains how the English language contains only four basic punctuation marks and three basic sentence types. Comments About The Book And The Author "No instructor has changed the course of my life more than Mark Hanen. His teaching style was a gift. . . . Words is chock-a-block full of many of the same crystal clear tips he taught in his classroom, and they are written in the same engaging style as when he presented them to his students. If readers take away even a smidgeon of his advice, they will be well on their way to becoming a better writer." Donna Kane's reviews, essays, poetry, and short fiction have been published widely as well as been aired on CBC and Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. She is the award-winning author of two collections of poetry, and h