Engage your readers and boost your impact! Do you write--a little or a lot--for a socially responsible organization, business, or program? Wish you had an accessible writing coach to help you quickly craft potent pieces that move your readers to act? This feisty one-stop-shop of distilled wisdom will show you-step by step-how to turbocharge your marketing and fundraising documents. Start getting the results you want, right now! Whether you're an accidental or emerging writer or a seasoned wordsmith, this comprehensive resource will help you build and manage the invaluable skills behind writing values-driven copy. You will find advice on everything from advancing your brand to storytelling to minding the devilish details. Discover how to painlessly: - Write and edit a full spectrum of clear, concise, creative pieces that will reach and influence your diverse intended audiences - Streamline and strengthen your writing process-from planning to proofreading - Develop your own confident, expert writing voice Included in these pages you will find: - More than 500 real-life examples from nonprofits, green businesses, government agencies, and others - Hundreds of stimulating questions and exercises that help you apply the lessons to your own work - Numerous guide sheets, checklists, and handy appendices - Dozens of warnings about potential pitfalls ... all this delivered with a generous helping of fun illustrations, cultural references, and humor. If you've ever had trouble expressing your passion in writing, or telling your story in a fresh and compelling way, this powerhouse of a book is for you! ADVANCE PRAISE: "This book should be on the shelf of every nonprofit administrator, community organizer, and advocate. There is literally nothing else of its kind on the market; it is 'The Elements of Style' for the grassroots fundraising and marketing world." -- Leif Wellington Haase, Director, California Program, New America Foundation "'Writing to Make a Difference' is a great balance of both instructional and interactive tips, tools, and exercises...and helps to lower the barrier for organizations that desire to tell their story in a way that captures both head and heart." -- Alandra L. Washington, Deputy Director, W.K. Kellogg Foundation "If you think your work is important, if you feel you have a message to deliver, if you have people who need to understand how this is done - this is the book. Massachi is the perfect guide and a tremendous coach." -- Jeff Hamaoui, CEO, Origo Inc. and social investment and enterprise specialist "Massachi has drilled down to all that is important about good writing. I recommend this book for those of us who write regularly, and for those of us who don't write because we don't think we can. "-- Kim Klein, author, 'Reliable Fundraising in Unreliable Times' "This is an outstanding work, one of the best I have read in the genre, and of possible use in the university, for public relations and organizational communication courses. The writing lessons are succinct, the methods to convey them effective, and the style itself an example of professional brilliance. I recommend 'Writing to Make a Difference' because I know that it will."-- Michael Bugeja, author, 'Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age' and Director, School of Journalism & Communication, Iowa State University AUTHOR BIO: Dalya F. Massachi, M.A. began writing for publication as an adolescent interested in social justice. Now, Dalya draws on her nearly 20 years of professional experience writing and editing for hundreds of socially responsible organizations. With passion and fresh insight, she reveals the top strategic insider techniques she has honed through her work as a successful grantwriter, editor, journalist, workshop instructor, and writing coach.

Philip Gerard analyses books that make a difference, fiction and non-fiction, classic and contemporary, and identifies the elusive ingredients that work together to produce a book that changes minds and lives.

From Newbery Honor winner Cece Bell comes an offbeat, pitch-perfect storybook for beginning readers that will have them in fits of giggles. “Maybe your foot smells good. Maybe your foot smells great. But I will not smell your foot until you say PLEASE.” Meet Chick and Brain. And their friend Spot. Chick likes to follow the rules. Brain might not be as smart as he looks. And Spot just wants to eat lunch. In a graphic reader loaded with verbal and visual humor, Cece Bell offers a comical primer on good manners gone awry. Simple, silly, and perfectly suited for its audience, this tale of Chick and Brain’s constant misunderstandings and miscommunications proves once again that Cece Bell is a master at meeting kids where they are.

First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models. The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

“People say, ‘Oh, it’s easy for you to make an impact. But I’m no one of importance. No one would listen to me.’ If I have learned anything, it is that they are wrong. Dead wrong. The world is just waiting to hear from them, just as it is waiting to hear from you.” —Ingrid Newkirk When Ingrid Newkirk almost single-handedly set into motion the largest animal-rights organization in the world, she knew that one person can make a difference. In this book, Ingrid has collected the wisdom, stories, and insight of dozens of activists and world-changers who have proven that one person can make a movement. This engaging and enlightening collection is a call to action for readers everywhere.Because one can make a difference.

The student projects presented in this book demonstrate a powerful approach to teaching writing, one that requires no special equipment or resources and can be adapted for students of any age. The key is getting students involved in action research and in writing about issues that are important to them and their communities. Written by public school teachers, these chapters describe projects covering a variety of issues, including avoiding teenage health risks, preserving oral histories, fighting racism, investigating environmental hazards, decreasing instances of teen pregnancy, and much more. Based on a process-model of writing instruction, these projects will show teachers how to engage their students while also teaching the basic skills that appear in educational standards and assessment frameworks.

This is not a standard guide to writing a dissertation, thesis, project report, journal article or book. Rather, this book will help researchers who are dissatisfied with the typical recipe approaches to standardised forms of writing-up and want to explore how academic writing can be used to greater effect. Writing Research Critically shows that writing up is not just about ‘presenting findings’ as if the facts would speak for themselves. As the authors show there are certain vital skills that any writer needs to develop within their academic writing, such as the ability to: develop critical understanding and a personal academic voice question assumptions and the status quo frame the background and transgress the frame read between the lines when reviewing the literature strengthen interpretations and conctruct persuasive arguments challenge and develop theory and explanations develop ideas that create possibilities for realistic action Packed with examples from a range of writing projects (papers, dissertations, theses, reports, journal articles and books), this book provides a practical and refreshing way to approach and present research. Through case studies the authors offer a step-by-step guide from the early stages of planning a writing project, whether an undergraduate paper or a professional publication, to the polishing processes that make the difference between a merely descriptive account to an argument that intends to be critical and persuasive. Written in a clear accessible style this book will inspire a wide range of researchers from undergraduates to postgraduates, early career researchers and experienced professionals working across a wide range of fields, and demonstrate how research can have more impact in the real world.