Writing tools

  My introduction to Roy Peter Clark was so confusing at the conference's opening reception that I was dreading a bit the session he led for us on our last day.
   And so I was wrong.
   He's entertaining and he uses musical illustrations and his arguments involve a lot of synthesis and metaphor, but the info he laid out for us Saturday morning was clear and sure did look like a set of coaching tools we could use, to help our interns learn the difference between reports and stories.
  He has a set of writing tools on iTunesU. These are podcasts.
   Then he has four books, Writing Tools (2006, 10th printing, 100K in print), The Glamor of Grammar (11 chapters on punctuation, "and I don't apologize for that one bit"), Help for Writers was designed as mobile app ($1.99, parts of writing process as he understands them, 10 solutions to the main problems of each), How to Write Short.
   He's under contract to Little Brown for Undressing Gatsby, what writers can learn from rereading the classics.

For instance, in weaker writing, the best part of the story often can be found hiding inside a sentence.
Find it, and rearrange the words to take advantage of the power of cadence to evoke importance (which he referred to as "heat").

In explaining how to "order words for emphasis," he began by asking us to think about a line from MacBeth:

"The Queen, my lord, is dead."
   In his day, English allowed Shakespeare other options for the order of the words —
• The Queen is dead, my lord.
• My lord, the Queen is dead.
• Dead is the Queen, my lord. [I am supplying this one, he didn't.]
In our day, thanks to Star Wars, we can add
• Dead the Queen is, my lord.

   In the version that Shakespeare chose, if you numbered the main words in their order of importance to the meaning, Queen=2, lord=3, dead=1
   The most emphatic word is at the end, dead.

   This is an ancient observation, he told us, citing as evidence a line he found in an essay by some Roman rhetorician from the age of Nero that Clark called "the Q man" (Quintilus? I have no idea ...), to wit: Sometimes orators find that they'll take a word or phrase that's imbedded in the meaning and lay it at the end.
And as in the common practice in humor, the punchline should come at the end.
   So his point was, we could improve a lot of our prose at once simply by remembering that the punchline goes at the end of the sentence.