Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts Into Finished Work

Steven M. Cahn · Victor L. Cahn

2013-03 · Columbia University Press

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This singular book illustrates how to edit a piece of prose and enhance its clarity of thought and felicity of style. The authors first present ten principles of effective composition, and then scrutinize three extended paragraphs, suggesting with remarkable specificity how to improve them. The volume also offers challenging practice questions, as well as two finished essays, one serious and one humorous, that demonstrate how attention to sound mechanics need not result in mechanical writing. Steven M. Cahn and Victor L. Cahn help readers deploy a host of corrective strategies, such as avoiding jargon, bombast, and redundancy; varying sentence structure; paring the use of adjectives and adverbs; properly deploying phrases and clauses; and refining an argument. Here is a book for all who seek to increase their facility in written communication.

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Steven M. Cahn is professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written or edited fifty books, among them Fate, Logic, and Time; God, Reason, and Religion; Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia; and From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor.

Victor L. Cahn is professor of English at Skidmore College. Among his numerous nonfiction works are Shakespeare the Playwright: A Companion to the Complete Tragedies, Histories, Comedies, and Romances and Classroom Virtuoso: Recollections of a Life in Learning. He has also published two novels and many plays, seven of which were produced Off-Broadway.

Mary Ann Caws is distinguished professor of comparative literature, English, and French at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.