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The Art and Craft of Writing

When we learn a language we may master its grammar and assume that we know the language. But does grammatical accuracy guarantee that we communicate our ideas, thoughts and feelings, whether spoken or written, with force and beauty? No. We often say that words began as an attempt to project the pictures in our mind. So, when we write, we are in a sense, painting with words. What we need to learn is that artistic/creative writing is a craft and one of the tools that can help the writer is the knowledge of the tropes and figures of speech that exist within the language. Though both, a trope and a figure of speech can be understood as a departure from literal language, as ‘figurative language’, there is a distinction ...

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