Write With Spunk and Bite

A librarian through and through, Virginia Allain writes about book topics, researching, and information for library users and librarians.

Make Your Writing More Engaging

Generations of students and writers relied on the classic, Elements of Style by E.B. White and Wiliam Strunk Jr. A slim book, it advises writers on how to write more clearly. Now it has a challenger in Arthur Plotnik's Spunk & Bite. Of course, the title is a play on Strunk and White.

I'll share with you some of the methods Plotnik recommends for writing with a "punchier, more engaging language and style." If you're writing the Great American Novel, blogging, journaling or just writing for business, this book has insight to make you a better writer.

Chapter Headings for Spunk & Bite

1. E.B. Whitewashed : a starting point -- Freshness : the wallop of the new

2. The pleasures of surprise

3. Extreme expression

4. Writers' words, drop by dottle

5. Upgrading your colors

6. Joltingly fresh adverbs -- Texture : writing into the mood

7. Tense : a sticky choice

8. Diction : we are the words

9. The punchy trope -- Word : language, aerobatic and incandescent

10. How to loot a thesaurus

11. Words with music and sploosh

12. Coining the bonne locution

13. Words with foreign umami -- Force : stimulation by any means

14. Dialogue tags with oomph

15. Enallage : a fun grammatical get

16. Intensifiers for the feeble

17. Opening words : the glorious portal

18. Closings : the three-point landing -- Form : life between the marks

19. The joys of hyper-hyphenation

20. A license. To fragment. Sentences

21. The poetry lists

22. The art of the semicolon

23. Daringly quoteless dialogue -- Clarity : "a house of great spickness and spanness"

24. The feng shui of writing

25. Hunting down danglers

26. Magic in the names of things

27. The earnestly engaging sentence -- Contemporaneity : a leg up on the competition

28. Writing for new generations

29. Hot pop and ephemeragy

30. Edge : writing at the nervy limits

31. Parting words : butterflies in the killing fields.

Here's the Book - to add punch to your writing style

Expanding Your Vocabulary

In chapter four, the author of Spunk & Bite describes collecting an arsenal of words to pep up your writing. Here are some recommended Internet sources to get you started.

• Word Spy
  Recently coined words.
• A.Word.A.Day
  The magic of words -- that's what A.Word.A.Day (AWAD) is about. It is a community of more than 900,000 linguaphiles in at least 200 countries. Sign up to receive the daily newsletter.
• Worthless Word for the Day
  Specializes in obscure words. Can receive it as e-mail.
• FreeRice
  Give free rice to hungry people by playing a simple game that increases your knowledge and vocabulary. The site gives you a word and four definitions. Guess the correct definition and grains of rice are donated. The more correct words you get, the ha

Hunting Down Danglers

Read chapter 25 in Spunk & Bite if this is a problem area for you.

Learn how to spot faulty modifiers in your writing.

In Praise of The Elements of Style

Writers talk about how important it is to them. (videos from Youtube)

Advocates for Strunk and White's Elements of Style

• Some writing lessons from the elements of style part...
  William Strunk's The Elements of Style, first published in 1918 and available for free in the public domain evolved into a book of the same name by Strunk and E.B White and is a classic writer's manual. Even in 1918, Strunk described the key points o
• Some writing lessons from the elements of style- Par...
  The Elements of Style first appeared in 1918. Written in 1918, the most updated version by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White is a favorite reference manual for those of us who write. I recently took a look at the Strunk's first version of the book, a
• Write Perfect Prose with, "The Elements of Style"
  William Strunk, Jr. first published,

Describe Your Writing Style

I asked my friends if they were ready to add zip to their writing with Spunk & Bite.

callinsky lm: My writing has been called many things but never traditional.

grannysage: I hope I succeed in being spunky in my writing. I like to bend and twist things now and then.

Upgrade Your Colors - Tips from Spunk & Bite

The book devotes a whole chapter to avoiding cliched color descriptions like her face turned lobster red under a steel-gray sky. I'm afraid I cringed a bit, as I'm sure I've described things as fire engine red or emerald green.

In Spunk & Bite, it tells writers that "color imagery should be fresh and inventive, but not constantly over-the-top." Plotnik gives ways to apply inventive metaphors to color and gives quite a few examples.

© 2010 Virginia Allain

Do You Want to Add Spunk and Bite to Your Writing Style?

grannysage on May 29, 2010:

This looks like a really good book. I need to add it to my growing list. I do have to chase my dangling participles, but what else are they good for? Thought provoking and appears to be a good resource.

Indigo Janson from UK on May 14, 2010:

Not sure, I'll have to check out the book first ;) Sounds like a very interesting read in any case, and I enjoyed finding out about it here.