Roy Peter Clark, one of America's most influential writing teachers, offers writing lessons we can draw from 25 great texts.
Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made. In The Art of X-Ray Reading, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through some of the most exquisite and masterful literary works of all time, from The Great Gatsby to Lolita to The Bluest Eye, and many more. Along the way, he shows you how to mine these masterpieces for invaluable writing strategies that you can add to your arsenal and apply in your own writing. Once you've experienced X-ray reading, your writing will never be the same again.
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This book sits on the (well-oiled) hinge between close reading and manual. Roy Peter Clark, who knows a thing or two about the writer's trade, digs into passages of successful writing from King Lear to the Goon Squad in order to unearth such writerly tools as foreshadowing, wordplay, shock value, repetition, rhetorical tropes, soliloquy and many more. It's a delightful read and an illuminating method for beginner or pro.
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Janet Burroway, author of Writing Fiction and Losing Tim