English Composition

Ready to build a scary story? First, you’ll need the right tools. Open this title in the Writer’s Toolbox series and discover plenty of tips and tools to get you started. Soon you’ll be sharing scares like a pro!

If the book tells a true story, you're listening to nonfiction. How else do you know? Quick, fun examples help you get the facts on nonfiction.

You can take audiences to faraway places. You can make giraffes burp and hippos sing. You can turn the sky purple and make audiences wonder what’s coming next. You can write awesome stories!

Young writers discover techniques for crafting persuasive opinion essays. Think rabbits make the best pets or that winter is better than summer? Share your opinion through writing! This engaging nonfiction book includes basic writing instructions, tips, and prompts tailored to beginning writers' needs. Perfect for research writing, browsing, or for fun!

You can make listeners smile. You can give them goosebumps or the giggles. You can even make them cry. You can show listeners the world the way you see it. You can write cool poetry!

Everyone has a story, and helping people tell their stories has been Nancy Slonim Aronie’s life mission. Building on her acclaimed Memoir as Medicine, this new guide tackles the short personal essay. With warmth and humor, Nancy provides prompts, inspiration, and hard-won wisdom to empower you to write an unforgettable narrative. You’ll learn to begin with an irresistible hook (“kill ’em with the first line”) and employ compelling direct quotes, drama, vulnerability, universal themes, and self-reflection to get readers into your corner.

“I can’t write.” How often do we hear this every day from students at all different skill levels? What is it about writing that causes such self-doubt, disabling procrastination, and fear of failure? “So many students do not identify writing as a positive experience or identify themselves as writers,” Liz Prather says. “We rarely talk about the social-emotional resilience needed around the act of writing.” In The Confidence to Write, Liz argues that we can help students reset their writerly self-regard by naming and examining their writing identity through practical activities.

The Long Form, Kate Briggs's long-awaited debut fiction, unmakes and remakes the novel to meditate on very real social issues, from housing to care-taking, laying bare the settings and support structures that make durational forms of co-existence first thinkable, then possible. At once acrobatic and deeply attentive, The Long Form insists on the creativity inherent in everyday life, showing how the acts of social composition (living arrangements) are continuous with the acts of artistic composition (page arrangements).

Photography is one of the most fulfilling, creative, lucrative, and challenging art forms. While cameras come in all shapes, sizes, costs, and capacities, digital cameras have the potential to make any novice photographer seem like an expert with a couple of adjustments. While photography is art, there are still scientific rules that apply to its expression. While the artistic side of photography can be achieved by the photographer's creativity, passion, and personal expression, the technical side has to be learned.

Have you ever wanted to captivate readers with a great opening, create fantastical creatures, realize a dastardly villain, or make your characters leap off the page? If you answered yes to any of these questions, Gail Carson Levine can help you achieve your goals. This companion to the popular Writing Magic teaches you how to become a world-class author. Drawing from her popular blog, the Newbery Honor author answers readers' questions and dives into how to make a story come alive.

This book will increase your child's word power, and you may learn something, too. A love of language is such an important skill, and this book explains the important of picking the right words and broadening your vocabulary with lots of examples. Learn the origins of the words gobbledygook and bop. Learn about compound words, metaphors, riddles, and even creating your own words. You'll also pick up some obscure words along the way from absquatulate to tintinnabulation and learn how lots of different words can describe similar activities.

How to Be a Writer is peppered with nuggets of practical advice for every person who is aspiring to write and be published, all told in Ruskin Bond's characteristic understated, tongue-in-cheek, humorous style. So, what is it that a person requires the most to become a writer? A love of books, of language, of life, an observant eye and a good memory, along with enthusiasm, optimism, and persistence. This book is an exclusive glimpse into the writing credo of Ruskin Bond, an author who has had an incredibly successful writing career spanning over 70 years.

Learn the secrets to photo composition: There's a common misconception that composition is mysterious and that only certain people have that natural gift for the techniques involved. The truth is that composition involves a set of skills that you can master. Just as you can use cookbook recipes to make your favorite meal - you don't have to be a famous French chef - you also can take amazing photos by just following a recipe!

Photography for beginners is an audiobook directed to anyone who is interested in learning how to take amazing photographs. It can be used whether you take photos as a hobby, as an aspiring professional photographer, or if you’ve simply never picked up a camera in your life. This audiobook highlights the main concepts required to consciously start taking great photographs. Everything is explained simply to make them useful for both complete beginners and already initiated photographers.

For thousands of years, humans have been using Tibetan singing bowls for healing and meditation. Their vibrations open up energies, stimulate the mind and have a wholesome effect on the body. Enjoy the mystical powers of the singing bowls. Their pulsating sounds allow the body to vibrate in resonance, which supports self-healing processes and letting go of tension. Treat yourself to a state of complete deep relaxation that calms the nervous system, regenerates the body and lifts up the soul.

One of America’s finest historians shows us how Bob Dylan, one of the country’s greatest and most enduring artists, still surprises and moves us after all these years. Growing up in Greenwich Village, Sean Wilentz discov­ered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager; almost half a century later, he revisits Dylan’s work with the skills of an eminent American historian as well as the passion of a fan.

The perfect book for all student journalists, this young learners adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters' Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's New York Times best-selling She Said will inspire a new generation of investigative journalists.

Do you want to write stories that catch your readers and never let go? Have you ever wondered how to create a book as magical as Ella Enchanted, as touching as Dave at Night, as captivating as Fairest? Well, now you can find out! In Writing Magic, Newbery Honor author Gail Carson Levine shares her secrets of great writing. She shows how you, too, can get terrific ideas for stories, invent great beginnings and endings, write sparkling dialogue, develop memorable characters - and much, much more.

If you aren’t suffering, you aren’t creating. Right? Wrong! Writing can and should be joyful, fulfilling… even fun! Applicable to writers in all genres and disciplines—from screenwriters to novelists, journalists to picture book authors, aspiring to many-times published—The Happy Writer is a heartfelt and optimistic guide that will show you the way to a happier writing journey.

Following in the grand tradition of such Irish memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and Are You Somebody?, Liam Clancy relates his life’s story in a raucously funny and star-studded account of moving from provincial Ireland to the bars and clubs of New York City, to the cusp of fame as a member of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers.