Thomas Fensch – författare

Completely revised and updated in a second edition, this volume represents the only book ever written that analyzes sports writing and presents it as "exceptional" writing. Other books discuss sports writers as "beat reporters" in one area of journalism, whereas this book shows aspiring sports writers a myriad of techniques to make their writing stand out. It takes the reader through the entire process of sports writing: observation, interviewing techniques, and various structures of articles; types of "leads;" transitions within an article; types of endings; use of statistics; do's and don'ts of sports writing; and many other style and technique points. This text provides over 100 examples of leads drawn from newspapers and magazines throughout the country, and also offers up-to-date examples of sports jargon from virtually every major and minor sport played in the U.S.

Completely revised and updated in a second edition, this volume represents the only book ever written that analyzes sports writing and presents it as "exceptional" writing. Other books discuss sports writers as "beat reporters" in one area of journalism, whereas this book shows aspiring sports writers a myriad of techniques to make their writing stand out. It takes the reader through the entire process of sports writing: observation, interviewing techniques, and various structures of articles; types of "leads;" transitions within an article; types of endings; use of statistics; do's and don'ts of sports writing; and many other style and technique points. This text provides over 100 examples of leads drawn from newspapers and magazines throughout the country, and also offers up-to-date examples of sports jargon from virtually every major and minor sport played in the U.S.

In Conversations with James Thurber this remarkable man who has been called America's twentieth-century Mark Twain and who was one of the great talkers of his time expresses his opinions on just about everything and recounts stories and anecdotes about his life which provided the basis for much of his humor writing.These entertaining interviews, conducted by Arthur Miller, Harvey Breit, George Plimpton, Arthur Gelb, and others, span twenty-two years, from 1939--1961. In them Thurber recalls his youth in Columbus, Ohio, his struggles as a student at Ohio State University, and his days of literary and journalistic apprenticeship in Europe as a code clerk and newspaperman who had to recreate entire stories from a few words of coded copy provided by the wire service. He tells too of his early days in New York City when he joined the staff of The New Yorker, of the origins of his drawings, of the pleasures that word games and mental puzzles gave him, and of his increasing blindness and its effect on his work and his perception of the world.As a man who like to express his opinions and to have an audience, Thurber enjoyed interviews and rarely refused to grant them. With the interview format he became so skilled that he perfected the interview-monologue into a Thurberesque art form, the oral equivalent of the autobiographical essay that he refined in his prose.

John Updike says: Any act of description is, to some extent, an act of praise, so that even when the event is unpleasant or horrifying or spiritually stunning, the very attempt to describe it is, in some way, part of that Old Testament injunction to give praise. Even though my books strike many people as immoral or morally useless, to me they are really moral investigations of how we live, and harsh, perhaps, because the standards are otherworldly. There was a tradition among my peers for frank and open talk, and I'd always been a rather shy, priggish, unexperienced adolescent. So maybe my revenge as a young adult was to put down all the dirty words that I'd always been a little shy about using. James Plath, a professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, is editor-publisher of "Clockwatch Review" and director of Hemingway Days Writer's Workshop and Conference in Key West.