Jenny Willow is a good one for sure. One of my all time favorites by a Sporting Classics magazine columnist is “ The Last Best Day” by Michael Altizer. If you love trout fishing, fathers and daughters, you will not be able to keep a dry eye reading Michael’s book. It’s thought provoking on so many levels.

Charles

The problem I have with Mike Gaddis's writing, is that is just to verbose. I think he likes to put at least 6 adjectives in front of every noun--sometimes drives me crazy. A good writer can "paint the picture" without using every color in his palette.

Mike needs to read Bill Tapply's article on "invisible writing".

Yes, that and Stephen King wrote a book “On Writing” I believe is the title.

Bill was a professor of English and literature at Clarke University.




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"Great minds" ?
My father's alternative was "Small minds differ little"

In Bill's article "Invisible Writing", Bill related that he once had his dad, "Tap" Tapply (a pretty darn good writer in his own right) critique a piece of his writing. It came back to him with a lot of red marks. According to Bill, this is what his dad told him:

“Don’t try to impress your reader with how cleverly you write. These fancy words, all these adjectives and adverbs and vocabulary words”—he pronounced the word vocabulary as if it meant “disgusting human waste product”—“all they do is call attention to you. You don’t want your reader aware of your writing at all. If you do your job, you’ll have them thinking about your ideas, your arguments, your characters, or whatever it is you’re trying to communicate. If someone tells you, ‘Wow, that’s great writing,’ you know you’ve failed.”

Good writing is like having an informal chat with the reader.





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Quote:

"...If someone tells you, ‘Wow, that’s great writing,’ you know you’ve failed.”
__________________


Or, as Ad Man David Ogilvy (1911-1999) put it:

"It is the professional duty of the advertising agent to conceal his artifice.
When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks', but when Demosthenes spoke, they said 'Let us march against Philip.'"