Reading, Stealing, and Writing Like a Writer by Wendy Bishop, a successful writer, reveals some insights about how to compose a good essay.

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Reading, Stealing, and Writing Like a Writer by Wendy Bishop, a successful writer, reveals some insights about how to compose a good essay. Instead of focusing on the overall structure of an essay, she takes her concentration into the sentence level. Unlike a student writer, Wendy Bishop reads sentence is a unique way. “I find sentences to be sculptural, like clay, sometimes things that writers bend, shape, and mold to their purpose” (Bishop). She sees writing an essay as creating an artwork where every piece of component has its own place. Similarly as making an artwork with clay, one should throw out any unnecessary wordings and sentences so that the essay can be clear and concise. Moreover, as one can use clay to structure different sharp that fits in the entire artwork, Wendy Bishop realizes that sentences have the same function. “If you start to study sentences as a writer does, you’ll see that they’re more varied and flexible, better instrument for exploring and expressing thought, then maybe you ever know” (Bishop). Therefore, the reader will understand that in order to compose a successful essay, sentences are extremely important. But how can we create good sentence? Wendy Bishop suggests us to use the technique of  “stealing.” According to Bishop, in order to “steal” the sentence, we need to learn how to analyze the sentence, how sentences work in each paragraph, how will they affect the meaning that we are trying to express, and so on. She also suggests we to keep a sentence book, a collection of good sentences. In that way, we can begin to imitate other successful writer’s writing and “steal” their sentence style for our own use. Bishop also suggests that there are no particular rules for writing sentences. “The rules we’re “given” can only address a small part of our language repertoire and are most often constraining and constricting rather than elucidating and explaining” (Bishop). Hence, to write a good essay, we need to be creative, instead of following the regular writing rules, we need to build up our own writing style. In conclusion, to accomplish a successful writing one needs to keep revising the essay, and more importantly in a sentence level.

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After reading Reading, Stealing, and Writing Like a Writer, I reckon that I have done a lot of practice similar to Wendy Bishop’s suggestions and I think they are very helpful and inspiring for the wiring and thinking process. I learned how to read like a writer from reading The Big Sea by Langston Hughes. From a particular chapter the Salvation, I notice that the importance of using short sentence to help emphasis that I want to express in my essay. By “stealing” his technique I know to use a short sentence after a paragraph of longer compounded complex sentences, so ...

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