Everybody does it. Besides that, it’s not wrong. In fact, sometimes it can be a beautiful thing. No, I’m not talking about that! I’m talking about ending sentences with a preposition.
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Category: Writing
Stylish Academic Writing 1: Good News, Bad News
Helen Sword rips the veil off one of the worst kept secrets in all of academia: Most academic writing is just plain awful. Jargon-filled, abstract, impersonal, sleep-inducing.
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Good Prose 4: Being Edited
Once I was harassing (in a good-natured way, of course) an editor I knew well from another publisher about a book she had put out. It was a biography that was overwritten and frequently lapsed into a sentimentalized caricature of the main subject. How could she have let that go through? “Oh,” she said, smiling. “You should have seen it before we edited it!” I knew exactly what she was talking about.
Good Prose 2: The Problem with Memoir
I’ve read more than one memoir and wondered, “Did this really happen? Is the author remembering correctly or perhaps just making things up entirely?” Memoir is a knotty genre. Can we trust it? Should we? Can a book be truthful even if it isn’t factual?
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Good Prose 1: Talking to Strangers
“To write is to talk to strangers.”
Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd practice what they preach by starting their book Good Prose quietly, with a sentence at once disarming and muscular. Indeed, the whole book is about this one, deceptively simple, nearly passive, seven-word sentence. Its rhythm is as beguiling as its substance is vital.
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A Call
A friend asked, “How do I know if I’m called to write?” He’d just read my summary of what J. I. Packer had to say to writers. He was responding to Packer’s last point: “Don’t attempt to be a writer unless you have got things to say which must be put on paper and are being called by God to do it. Being a writer is as vocational as being a preacher.”
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Advice for Writers from Packer
J. I. Packer, best known as author of Knowing God, has some sage counsel for writers. In the following video, we get a bit of classic Packer as he offers some clear, straightforward counsel.
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Remembering Calvin Miller
Calvin Miller, best known as author of The Singer from IVP, died August 19. He was a prolific writer, having authored dozens of books, for many of which I worked with him as editor. IVP was proud to have put Calvin on the map of the publishing world with his surprisingly successful “mythic retelling” of the gospel story, a book that went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
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Write About Yourself
The grinding dogma of fifth-grade English teachers everywhere has done incalculable damage to the sensitive psyches of countless school children. One of the most onerous dicta of Miss Vera Strict was this: “Never use I when you write.” The calcified trauma of this lives on in otherwise normal adults.
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First-Book Syndrome
The other day one of our editors, Dave Zimmerman, came to me with a proposal from a prospective author for a book. It was on prayer, mission, evangelism, the history of global Christianity, the future of Christianity, the Holy Spirit, the Kingdom of God and justice.
I looked at Dave and said, “First-Book Syndrome.” He grimly nodded in agreement.
What is First-Book Syndrome?
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