Writing as Craft and Magic, Second Edition, outlines a compelling approach to conceiving, reporting, organizing, and writing articles for today's media. The book revolves around the central idea that writers improve most quickly by combining the powers of technique ("craft") with creativity ("magic"). Applying this method to news and feature writing--both print and online--it focuses on leads, organization, transition, clarity, drama, and other elements that drive good writing toward excellence. Aimed at students in upper-level undergraduate writing and reporting courses, Writing as Craft and Magic provides a clear and succinct instructional system--with practical models, a wealth of examples, and step-by-step guides--to help students understand and apply craft and magic to daily assignments. Author Carl Sessions Stepp, a seasoned journalist at the national level, structures his system in three parts. He first evokes the art of writing, then applies that art to standard journalistic writing, and concludes with a strong section on advanced writing techniques for features. He also offers advice and tips on how newsrooms currently operate in the age of multimedia journalism. This revised edition includes an expanded exercise section at the end of each chapter, more coverage of the demands of multimedia journalism (convergence), and updated chapters on incorporating the Internet into research and writing for the daily news cycle.

Students must study what accomplished authors have written and practice the styles, approaches, or methods they employ in order to become proficient writers. The practical, standards-based book dives deeply into the genres of poetry, narrative fiction, narrative nonfiction, informative/explanatory, and opinion/argument. Using close reading of mentor texts, analysis of specific writing strategies in those texts, and the application of those strategies in the student's own writing, students will be equipped for any type of writing.

Responding to recent powerful arguments that theory has only a limited role in the field, teachers of composition suggest to their colleagues how they can, and why they should, teach from a theoretical stance developed from their own experience. The ten essays focus on the process of knowing, the historical and social context, and mechanisms of teaching. Paper edition (1947-0), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A call to create your own magical practice by understanding magical correspondences, incorporating your own lived experiences and ancestry, and applying intuitive insights. Crafting your own magic is a personal and fluid journey, and you won’t find scripted spells and rituals within these pages. Instead, you’ll find a collection of pathways to a magical practice rooted in your lived experience and the relationships you form in seen and unseen realms. Here, witch, intuitive energy healer, and death-worker Cassie Uhl will share techniques to hone your inherent intuitive abilities, personal experiences, and practices—all of which she encourages you to modify to suit your needs. Your magical practice and the path that shapes it will be as unique as you are, as it should be. Uhl walks you through crafting your own magic using the elements as guideposts: air, on developing intuition; fire, on magic in relationship; water, on correspondences; earth, on ethics and ancestry; and spirit, on bringing it all together. What crafting your own magic looks like for you will be personal and fluid. Where would you turn to seek inspiration, community, means, and modes to craft your magic? Perhaps you would shift inward to the trees, flowers, birds, or invisible in-between spaces. There will likely be parts of your magical practice that no one but you will be able to define as true. For these reasons, parts of crafting your own magic may feel uncomfortable. From these places of discomfort, not knowing, and becoming, your magical practices can flourish.

This introductory creative writing text uses a unique, multi-genre approach to provide students with a broad-based knowledge of their craft, treating them as professional writers. Beginning by discussing elements common to all genres, this book underscores the importance of learning good writing habits before committing to a genre, encouraging writers to look beyond their genre expectations and learn from other forms. The book then devotes one chapter to each of the major literary genres: fiction, poetry, drama and creative nonfiction. These style-specific sections provide depth as they compare the different genres, furnishing students with a comprehensive understanding of creative writing as a discipline and fostering creativity. The discussion concludes with a chapter on digital media and an appendix on literary citizenship and publishing. With exercises at the end of each chapter, a glossary of literary terms, and a list of resources for further study, A Writer's Craft is the ideal companion to an introductory creative writing class. It has been listed as one of the 'Best Books for Writers' by Poets and Writers magazine.

Craft lives inside the artist, and it operates in the mind, not in standards or techniques. Creative writers navigate thresholds in consciousness as they develop their arts practice. Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative Writing explores what it is to be an artist as it traces radical, feminist, and culturally embedded traditions in craft. The new term "craft consciousness" identifies the nexus from which writers explore making processes and practitioner knowledge. Writers, as with all artists, create and reimagine themselves anew, and it is in this perpetual state of becoming that they find ways to enlarge their sense of artistry through an exploration of forms, processes, and mediums beyond the written word. For writers, this book initiates a reexamination of the mission of creative writing through disrupting patriarchal, racist, colonialist, ableist, and capitalist associations with dominant craft. Drawing from twenty-five interviews with living artists outside of writing and in a host of fields from conceptual art to leatherwork and dance, the book shines a light on how the processes associated with craft are embodied. Craft is an internalized matrix; it need not be commodified for the marketplace or codified in the standards necessitated by institutions of higher education. By redesigning writing workshops and MFA/PhD programs through craft consciousness, new potentials and collaborations emerge, and it becomes more conceivable to imagine dynamic, inclusive relationships between writers, scientists, and other artists.