Introduction

How this book will help you to write better.
The purpose of this book is to teach writing. We learn to write in three ways (1) by studying grammar, sentence structure, mechanics, and organization; (2) by studying the writing of professional writers; and (3) by practicing in our own writing the skills we have learned. This book provides you with many different types of good prose to examine and to use as models and suggests many topics for you to write about.

Part One
Description

Perhaps the first kind of writing we attempt, as we are growing up, is descriptive, the kind of writing that tells us how things appear. If not purely descriptive, it is at least a mixture of sights and sounds we know with a simple narrative of what happened and when. From an early age we make our conversation and our letters describe as well as tell. The neighbors have a new dog. What does he look like? Relatives visit in a new car. What color is it, what size, what model?