Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation by Noah Lukeman

From the Publisher

The first practical and accessible guide to the art of punctuation for creative writers. Punctuation reveals the writer: haphazard commas, for example, reveal haphazard thinking; clear, lucid breaks reveal clear, lucid thinking. Punctuation can be used to teach the writer how to think and how to write. This short, practical book shows authors the benefits that can be reaped from mastering punctuation: the art of style, sentence length, meaning, and economy of words. There are full-length chapters devoted to the period, the comma, the semicolon, the colon, quotation marks, the dash and parentheses, the paragraph and section break, and a cumulative chapter on integrating them all into "The Symphony of Punctuation." Filled with exercises and examples from literary masters (Why did Poe and Melville rely on the semicolon? Why did Hemingway embrace the period?), A Dash of Style is interactive, highly engaging, and a necessity for creative writers as well as for anyone looking to make punctuation their friend instead of their mysterious foe.

KLIATT

Lukeman is a literary agent and president of Lukeman Literary Management Ltd. He has written two books that are part of the curriculum in many writing programs: The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile and The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life. A Dash of Style is another such book, the kind that writers of creative prose should read and apply to their own work. Lukeman's purpose is not to present a usage manual, delineating the various correct uses of the comma, for instance. His book is much more than that. He discusses, with samples from literary works, how writers use punctuation for artistic purposes. In his chapter on the semicolon, for example, he illustrates how it can "balance sentence length and rhythm." In the introduction, Lukeman writes, "As a literary agent I've read tens of thousands of manuscripts, and I've come to learn that punctuation, more than anything, belies clarity—or chaos—of thought. " Throughout the rest of the text, he explains how writers can accomplish that clarity with careful use of punctuation.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents