Guides: Good Sentences: Drafting & Editing

Drafting

Shitty First Drafts
By Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1995)
Draft No. 4
Replacing the words in boxes. by John McPhee. The New Yorker (April 29, 2013)
Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision
By Mary Karr. In Art of Memoir, pp. 211-18 (2015).
Writing as Reading
By Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, pp.263-67 (2001)
How Do You End an Essay
By Phillip Lopate, To Show and Tell, pp. 45-63 (2013)
Lydia Davis’s Very Short Stories
By Lydia Davis, The Atlantic (July/August 2014)
Faculty Profile: Peter Ho Davies
University of Michigan
Helen Zell Writers' Program

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Call Number: Writing Collection PN147 .L315 1995
Publication Date: 1995
Chapters Shitty First Drafts and Perfectionism are particularly helpful (and quick!) (Links for viewing online are available to University of Michigan Law Students only).
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Call Number: PE1429 .Z5 2001
Publication Date: 2001
Writing Without Teachers by Peter Elbow
Call Number: Writing Collection PE1409.5 .E5
Publication Date: 1975
On Writing by Stephen King
Call Number: Writing Collection PS3561.I483 Z475 2000
Publication Date: 2000

Simplicity and Clutter
By William Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976)
"The Trouble with Intentions"
By Verlyn Kinkenborg, The New York Times, (September 24, 2012).
Final Word on U.S. Law Isn't: Supreme Court Keeps Editing
By Adam Liptak, The New York Times (May 24, 2014)
Omission: Choosing what to leave out
By John McPhee, The New Yorker, (September 14, 2015).
Behind the Blue Pencil: Censorship or Creeping Creativity?
By Jacques Barzun, The American Scholar, Vol. 54, No. 3, pp. 385-88 (Summer 1985)
Action
By Richard Lanham, in Revising Prose, 5th ed. (2007)
Before You Submit: Some Tips on Self-Editing
By Carol Saller, The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 9, 2011)
Perfectionism
By Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, pp. 28-32 (1995)