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The Writer’s Chronicle: “Writerly Fingerprints: Syntax as Style”

By virtue of the relative clarity with which they develop ideas and map out logical relationships in a pleasing ebb-and-flow movement, cumulative sentences abound in fiction.

Since we writers enjoy unique and multifarious rhythmic experiences, it is crucial for us to understand how syntax can help change the pace of our sentences, accelerating, interrupting, or retarding them, “using variations in sound to create differing emphasis.” Different types of sentences achieve different stylistic and emotional effects. Read more…

The Tishman Review: “Poking a Stick in the Eye of Silence: An Interview with Martha Cooley”
Volume 3/Issue 4, October 2017, pp. 137–142

Martha Cooley is a long-standing member of PEN America, a contributing editor for A Public Space, a professor of English at Adelphi University, and the author of The Archivist, Thirty-Three Swoons, and most recently the memoir, Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss. Begun as a journal, her memoir in essays takes place primarily in Castiglione del Terrier, a small Italian town in the Lunigiana region where Martha repairs with her husband, Antonia Romani, to write and work on co-translating Antonio Tabucchi into English. Read more…

From the Blog

  • animals

Animal Characters in Children’s Picture Books

The Cat in the Hat. Peter Rabbit. Winnie-the-Pooh. Franklin. Frances. Angelina Ballerina. Olivia. Animal characters have frolicked, slithered, and trotted, squeaked, meowed and pranced, pirouetted, oinked, and entertained readers in children’s literature for centuries. Published in 1658, Orbis Sensualium Pictus was the first picture book made for children and the first to use animals as characters. Written by John Amos Comenius, Orbis Pictus (The World of Things Obvious to the Senses Drawn in Pictures, or... Read more ❯

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