Customer Reviews

Writing Wide: Exercises in Creative Writing

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Writing Wide: Exercises by Wisconsin author and writing expert Billie A. Williams is an instructional guidebook to successful writing techniques with exercises to practice for the improvement of one's skills. A practical instructional to avoiding common pitfalls; broadening word choice; promoting the effortless flow of narration, and so much more, Writing Wide is a superb self-improvement guide and highly recommended for writers of all skill and experience levels.

From cover to cover this book is only 72 pages. Of these 72, 55 are devoted to the essence of the subject matter. The 55 pages are padded with extra white space and uninspiring quotations -- most of which have little to do with writing. One could obtain more useful and well-written advice on this subject by Googling "creative writing tips". It appears that the author was too intent in forcing this "wide" theme to work that she ignored her own advice -- weak verbs, passive voice, and clunky sentence structure are a few things that come to mind quite easily.

It is obvious that this book's incompetent editors didn't do their jobs. This book is full of errors in grammar and punctuation. I have never seen a double quotation mark used before for an apostrophe. The proof readers missed obvious things like ""ly" on page 64 and the use of *'s instead of "'s on pages 34 and 35. The over use of slashes is insane. Have some guts to pick he or she and forget s/he and other multiple meaning stuff. Ugh!

From this book I had hoped for some invigorating exercises that would permit me to sharpen my writing skills. But, with instructions such as "Make up a story using ... footprints ..." or "Rewrite a favorite fairy tale ...", it wasn't to be.

With a little more writing, my review would contain more useful information than what exists in this booklet being reviewd.

This is a powerful little book packed with more information than some of the larger books I have purchased. I am glad I bought it.