Several chapters and some of the material in the Appendices of this
book appeared in earlier forms in my previous book Power Prose
(2004).
I wish to thank my (continuing and new) contributing writers
Paul Dawson, Adam Deverell, Scott Drummond, Jenny Lee, Winnie
Salamon, Lucinda Strahan and Nadine Cresswell-Myatt. I am also
grateful to the writers who gave permission for their work to appear
in the Appendices—Dan Burt, Tori Cavanagh, Henrietta Cook, Andy
Drewitt, Alyssa French, Corey Hague and Brendan Lawley; and great
appreciation to Michael Long for having written his hard-hitting and
important letter to the editor. I am also very appreciative of the many
students whose sentences and other work I have included here as
examples: Rachel Gogol, Yuhan Lim, Eugene Lee, Aimee Neistat,
Hannah Teoh, David Wollstencroft and Cliff Gay.
Once again, this book could not have happened without the
vision and encouragement of Foong Ling Kong at MUP, and the tireless
assistance of my ‘in-house’ editor and researcher, Andrew
McRae.
As much as possible I have attributed sources of material used,
but like many long-time teachers, I have stored in that faulty harddrive
called my memory many files and fragments of material that
may be unidentified, and I would welcome claims for acknowledgement
for future editions of this book.