Perfect Your Writing: How to be a stylish, insightful and convincing writer.

Written by William Strunk Jr., Mark Twain and Arnold Bennett

Narrated by Chirag Patel

Are you keen to perfect your writing? This audiobook will teach you how to be a stylish, insightful and convincing writer. This compilation includes Twain's On the Decay of the Art of Lying, Strunk's The Elements of Style, and Bennett's The Author's Craft - all in one.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr first clarifies the writer's understanding of how to - correctly. In it, Strunk has laid a detailed, essential map, one he believed pays off, for in unlocking the secrets of style, one opens the terrain for mastery of literature.Now over a century since its first publication, the book is anything but outdated, as it is still widely used today – just testament to Strunk’s timeless knowledge and mastery with the pen."The skilled observer ... does not have to change his mind." – Arnold Bennett.The Author's Craft is Arnold Bennett’s four-part writing tutorial. As an esteemed journalist, novelist and playwright, he believed truly 'Seeing Life' primed the pen, out of which 'Writing Novels', 'Writing Plays' and 'The Artist and The Public' emerge. In the exposition, he expands on how to see the world, and how to not overlook the details most miss… These skills and techniques give rise to the craft he feels the author is really trying to achieve: art.Mark Twain’s “On the Decay of the Art of Lying” was his wryly told essay on why he felt the world needs educated lying, published in 1880 for a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, Connecticut. The way he saw it, everyone lies at some point in their lives. Twain decided that lying could be a valuable skillset in various different arenas - provided you knew how to do it well, and didn’t try to hurt anybody. As he put it, "What chance has the ignorant uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I against Mr. Per—against a lawyer? Judicious lying is what the world needs."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lamplight
• Release date: Feb 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669696025

William Strunk Jr.

William Strunk, Jr. (1869-1946) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest of William and Ella Garretson Strunk's four children. Strunk excelled in school, eventually earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati and a PhD at Cornell University. He then attended the Sorbonne and the Collège de France from 1898-99 where he studied morphology and philology. Strunk began his academic career teaching mathematics at Rose Polytechnical Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana from 1890-91, then returned to Cornell and taught English there for 46 years. In 1922 he published English Metres, a study of poetic metrical form, and began writing he critical editions of various classical works. Strunk joined a literary group called the Manuscript Club which held Saturday night meetings to discuss writing and literature. There, Strunk met and became friends with a young aspiring writer, Elwyn Brooks ("E.B.") White. In 1918, Strunk published The Elements of Style, but originally only intended it to be used by his Cornell students, who nicknamed it "the little book." In 1935, Strunk and Edward A. Tenney revised the manuscript and re-published the guide for wider distribution as The Elements and Practice of Composition. Years later, after Strunk had passed away, E.B. White - now working at the New Yorker - praised the "little book" in his column, calling it a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English." As a result of the new attention White's praise generated for Strunk's manuscript, Macmillan and Company commissioned White to revise the 1935 edition for republication. The resulting book became an immediate hit. Since The Elements of Style (now credited to both Strunk and White) was originally republished in 1959, sales of the book - and subsequent editions - has exceeded ten million copies and the book is often referred to simply as "Strunk and White." William Strunk retired from Cornell in 1937 and in 1945 he suffered a mental breakdown, diagnosed as "senile psychosis." He died less than a year later at the Hudson River Psychiatric Institute in Poughkeepsie, New York.