Writing Prose

Preface ; A Note to the Student ; EXPOSITION ; Illustration ; Patterns ; Our Deteriorating Environment ; The Haunting Powers of God's Dog ; The London Poor ; Talking 'Funny' ; Man's Best Friend? ; A Whale of a Time ; Romancing the Stones ; Restatement ; Reluctant Villain ; From Gabriel Dumont ; Indignation, Resentment, and Collective Guilt ; Blazing Skies ; Comparison ; The New Porn ; What If?-English versus German and French ; Untamed World ; Analogy ; The Parts of Speech ; The Dissertation and the Mime ; Titanic and Leviathan ; In Praise of the Humble Comma ; Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Masters ; Reasons ; The Threat to Canada's Beauty ; How I Learned to (Almost) Love the Sin Lobbyists ; That &*?#@ Machine ; Effects ; Los Angeles Notebook ; Night Walkers and Mystery Mongers: Sense and Nonsense at the Edge of Science ; Cold Fury, White Death ; Hot and Bothered by 'Disgusting' Names ; Analysis ; Out of the Shadow of The Bay ; Cultural Genocide ; Unreasonable Facsimile ; The Chicken Farm ; The Right Call ; Call of the Wild ; DEFINITION ; Toilet ; Plot ; Conservation Defined ; Scouts ; The Fact of Sin ; The Metric System (Sort Of) ; PERSUASION ; Bungee Jumping over Victoria Falls ; Purse Snatching ; Of Love in Infants ; Women in Prison ; A Modest Proposal ; The Golf Ball on the Grass ; On Receiving the Nobel Prize ; The Search for Marvin Gardens ; Fiddling while Africa Starves ; Igniting the Entrepreneurial Spark ; ARGUMENT ; Liberalism and Censorship ; The Shock-Art Fallacy ; The Implications of a Free Society ; Streets that Work ; The Motive for Metaphor ; Be Fruitful, Or Else ; DESCRIPTION ; Hard Times in the Old West ; Stagecoach Station ; The Belly of Ontario ; A Paris Plongeur ; Biter's Banquet ; Flights of Fancy ; The Snake Man ; Bubbles in the Ice ; Welcome to the Death Hilton ; Lucy in the Sky ; Above the Line ; In the Eye of the Wind ; NARRATION ; True North ; The Loss of the Cospatrick ; The Unicorn in the Garden ; From The Great Lone Land ; On a Hill Far Away ; Tobogganing ; A, B, and C ; Overeating in College ; Once More to the Lake ; A Tale of a Canadian Book up against the System ; WRITING ABOUT WRITING ; The Singular First Person ; Courtesy to Readers-Clarity ; CLUTTER ; Notes on Punctuation ; Cliches Aren't Everything ; Mad Metaphors ; Native Themes ; Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body ; Acknowledgements ; Glossary ; Thematic Index ; Author-Title Index