Books that can improve writing

Anybody have any suggestions for books that can serve as a good example for newfag writers? Good but easy prose, characters, etc etc

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languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=strunk
chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Most books by Donald maass

Doesn't exist. You don't want to study easy prose, you want to study grammar and know how to use it. You want a vocabulary that proves your giant ossified brain can crush any other mortal's. You can't learn how to build a plot or make your characters come alive from a book, but you can learn it from many good books. And practice.

What good books

How do I study

Can you write a step by step guide please

Nobody has time to do what you're saying.

>What good books
Read the sticky, or lurk more. The memes are constant.

>How do I study
>Can you write a step by step guide please
No.

>Nobody has time to do what you're saying.
You have time to write, correct? All I'm telling you to do is read good books and pay attention. Maybe crack open Aristotle's Organon and learn how to properly order your thinking. You should be reading while writing anyway, to keep your language fresh.

All the pseuds on here will tell you to read more, read better, and read some guides.
>I won't
I recommend you read as many shit books as you do quality literature, if not more, for the simple reason that most would-be writers fail to achieve the models they set up for themselves by consulting and emulating the classics.
Reading trash, on the other hand, makes the faults and vices of bad literature immediately apparent, and one can learn what NOT to do very quickly that way.
On the plus side, you may also pick up some valuable tips on how to spin a page-turning story and write an airport bestseller, and the bottom line will be infinitely more rewarding than the faint praise you'll receive from a bunch of pseuds on the internet if you attempt to write literary fiction and somehow miraculously manage to get published.

Moby-Dick

You're a newfag who doesn't even know how to greentext properly and you spam the word pseud in your posts because you've a complex over pushing a generation of young writers toward mediocrity for the shekels.

Airport bestseller? Fuck off, hack.

Go back to lurking.

newfag says the reddit-spacer. keep your pride and hopes up, cunty.

Lmao. Reddit spacing is a meme that newfags use to call out other newfags. I've been posting here back when Digg was the main normie site and Reddit was fringe.

Seriously go back to lurking if this is the sort of loser shit you're going to tell these young kids.

well it's certainly a great pity that your skills at detecting irony aren't as great as those for detecting newfags since the sentence beginning "on the plus side" in my original post was precisely that.
As to the rest of the post, concerning books properly qualified as "shit", I stand by that since that piece of excellent advice was given out by some of the past masters of writing for exactly those reasons.

Try reading Siddhartha for an easy intro book. Then read a more adept book. Vineland by Pynchon was a perfect moderate book to me because it had its challenges, but was comfortable to read and the characters are hilarious yet believable.
Once you've read a book or two you've *keyword incoming* enjoyed, pick up a copy of Strunk and White. Really great little book that helps improve prose in all the right places.
After that it all becomes more practice, more reading, and ultimately building either your dictionary or your speaking skills to better apply just the right words to their accurate details.

>recommending the pseud writing handbook with all sorts of random rules and plenty of incorrect grammar to boot
>not recommending the new oxford guide to writing by thomas kane which has dozens of examples from classic literary works to serve as examples and references

Here's some great guides for you:
The New Oxford Guide on Writing - Thomas Kane
Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student - Edward P.J. Corbett
The Imaginative Argument - Frank Ciotti

All of those texts include multitudes of examples of great writing to serve as inspiration and references.

Explicitly for argumentation and style, this is what I like, but I think this stuff is personal preference to some extent:
Grammar and Style - Michael Dummett
Rulebook for Arguments - Anthony Weston

Also, check out the Benjamin Franklin method to learning to write better. IIRC, it involved attempting to absorb other people's styles by memorizing, and then rewriting through recall and eventually intuition.

-- --

Let me know if this does anything for you.

There's this chart, but I wouldn't know where to begin; sorry, OP.

Strunk and White take excerpts from classics as well, such as Faulkner. And if you're going to make claims which go as far to say a book on grammar has grammatical errors within, you're going to need to give proof.

For plot character stuff look up Invisible Inc, Immdiate Fiction, and Lajos Egri's books.

Anyone saying it can't be learned from a manual simply dosent know what thyre talking about

this is so well-known so as to be meme-tier stuff in linguistics/grammar circles.

just take a look at the relevant posts on this respected blog: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=strunk

pic related

That link is fucking cringey. Some of the arguments were attacking the statement 'omit needless words' as an archaic hindrance of thought. That's embarrassing--
You're embarrassing.

>ad hominem
Not an argument. Here's another: chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497

Try something like Michael Dummett's rulebook. It's pretty good.

...

>b-but m-m-muh Strunk is what my Marxist college professor told me to use and it's w-what I've u-u-used all of my life!
Use a white man's grammar book next time.

Dummett? GTFO, he was a raging liberal immigrationist gimp. Worse than the marxshits.

Michael Dummett died 6 years ago. What are you talking about? And I'm sure that Strunk & White were full-on white supremacists.

Oh shit you're right:
>Dummett drew heavily on his work in this area in writing his book On Immigration and Refugees, an account of what justice demands of states in relationship to movement between states. Dummett in that book argues that the vast majority of opposition to immigration has been founded in racism and says that this has especially been so in the UK.

>He has written of his shock on finding anti-Semitic and fascist opinions in the diaries of Frege, to whose work he had devoted such a high proportion of his professional career.
Goddamn, what a fucking hack. He still had some good writing advice though.

You're obviously not familiar with the man and his other "hobbies" outside of philosophy: they include tarot cards, proportional representation voting systems, muh human rights, anti-raychism, and promoting the wholesale importation of extra-european immigrants into the UK and Europe.

Just because somebody has shit ideas doesn't mean they can't give good writing advice. I highly doubt that Strunk & White would give a shit about their own country. But yeah I didn't know about his virtue-signaling, so thanks for letting me know.

Imagine reading somebody like Frege, being mind-blown about his insights into the nature of logic, but then thinking to yourself "but this stuff about the Jews, no, he's clearly wrong about this". I hope I'm never so arrogant to think so superficially of a superior's thoughts.

I never implied his book on writing was shit. y comment was directed at the Marxist-white man opposition above.

On Writing, SK