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The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)

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Published:
Little, Brown and Company 2016
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Description
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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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
01/26/2016
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780316265577, 9780316282161
ASIN:
B00X47ZMDQ
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Roy Peter Clark. (2016). The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing. Little, Brown and Company.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Roy Peter Clark. 2016. The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing. Little, Brown and Company.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Roy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing. Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Roy Peter Clark. The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing. Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 17:09:52
Date Updated:
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        Roy Peter Clark is senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, one of the most prestigious schools for journalists in the world. He has taught writing at every level — from schoolchildren to Pulitzer Prize-winning authors — for more than forty years.
        A writer who teaches and a teacher who writes, he has authored or edited nineteen books on writing and journalism, including The Art of X-Ray Reading, How to Write Short, Writing Tools, The Glamour of Grammar, and Help! for Writers. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he is considered a garage-band legend.

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title
The Art of X-Ray Reading
fullDescription
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.
reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        October 5, 2015
        In this collection of literary case studies, Clark (How to Write Short) dispenses warm and witty advice on how to uncover hidden layers of meaning in classic and contemporary literature. Clark moves through his close readings expertly and rapidly, often beginning with his personal history; for instance, he admits that The Great Gatsby was lost on him at first, though it won him over on successive readings. Clark’s enthusiasm and expertise could seduce any reader to read (or reread) a text. Clark has assembled a diverse canon, including works as ancient as The Canterbury Tales and as recent as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. At the conclusion, he gives readers the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned to a series of standalone excerpts from the books he’s mentioned, giving his own interpretations on the back of the page. This is an infectiously enthusiastic guide to becoming an active reader, an homage to the wealth of meaning in great literature, and a striking demonstration of how that meaning can be transmitted from author to reader across centuries and oceans. Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel & Goderich.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Starred review from October 15, 2015
        Just when you think Poynter Institute senior scholar Clark, who has written some of the best books on the writer's craft, has covered everything related to the subject, he digs deep into literature and excavates a gold mine of artistic strategies for great writing. While his last book, How to Write Short (2013), examined pithy prose in today's ubiquitous media, this illuminating volume focuses on superb writing through the centuries. Readers may not consider the work of ancient poets Homer and Virgil as examples of cinematic writing, but these scribes, who zoom in and out of scenes with words, have a lot to teach us. Clark cites a passage from Virgil's The Aeneid that describes a raging storm at sea, noting that centuries "before anyone dreamed of the aerial shot or...special effects...there was Virgil creating in language the vertiginous seascape of the drowning sailors." Clark also has a flair for language as he describes one of Virgil's "amazing" sentences as "coiling and uncoiling like the serpents it describes, directing our eyes back and forth, in and out, from the action of the serpents to the movements of the sea, then close enough to see eyes of blood and fire." The Great Gatsby yields an intricately built architecture in which F. Scott Fitzgerald plants "strategic treasures"--words and images--at the end of his first chapter that are echoed in the luminous, oft-quoted last four paragraphs of the novel. Flannery O'Connor's short stories, writes Clark, school us in the uses of foreboding and foreshadowing. Gustave Flaubert employed small gestures and domestic details to reveal Emma Bovary's frame of mind. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer demonstrates poetic flow in his ecstatic descriptions of spring. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye offers the lyrical use of repetition, not to be confused with redundancy. With lively, colorful writing and inspired practical advice, this guide earns a spot along with Clark's Writing Tools (2006) as essential reading for writers. Recommended for book lovers as well.

        COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        Starred review from November 1, 2015

        Clark (How To Write Short; The Glamour of Grammar) wants to improve your writing. How? By showing you how to read--really read. Students of literature will be familiar with the notion of close or active reading, but Clark takes it one step further: recommending readers engage with details, word choice, repetition, even sentence length to glean insight from great (and not so great) writers. He invites readers to ask: "How did they do that?" and dig to find the spark that marks memorable writing. Each chapter homes in on a particular work or writer, providing a close analysis of the text. Clark moves beyond criticism to consider the nuances that make for great prose, presenting these in a series of easy-to-follow, practical lessons that make you want to delve into works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Vladimir Nobokav's Lolita, Shakespeare's sonnets, and more, until you, too, see them with Clark's x-ray vision. VERDICT This enjoyable book is perfect for students, writers, and anyone who wants to learn more about great literature.--Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib.

        Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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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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