Cindy Rogers is a teacher, an editor, and the author of three books and more than 100 stories, plays, articles, essays, and word conundrums. Her most recent book, Word Magic: Your Source to Language That Enchants, Empowers, Convinces and Wins readers, is the result of several years of research on the richness and subtleties of the English language. Numerous articles and columns on the use of language and writing have been published in Writer’s Digest, Children’s Writer, and Children’s Magazine Market.

Her stories have appeared in Highlights for Children, Cricket, Spider, Sports Illustrated for Children, Hopscotch, and have been selected for anthologies by Milkweed Editions and Standard Publishers.

Ms. Rogers' educational pieces have been published in Good Apple Newspaper, Educational Oasis, Parents of Teenagers and excerpts of her work have been used in testing materials by Harcourt Brace, McGraw Hill, SIRS, and Exploring English.

A teacher of children and adults in the public and private sectors for 20 years, Cindy Rogers has a BS in education and French and is currently working on her MFA in Writing.

Word Magic
The Writers Bookstore, September 2004
ISBN 1-8897-1519-0

Bookstores and newsstands, billboards and the media are flooded with rivers of words competing for the consumer's attention. But we want our own writing and the writing of our students to be read and thought about, too. Good writing depends on more than the creation of a believable blurb of words. It needs to be infused with language that energizes, persuades, enchants, convinces, awes, pulls a reader in, or stops him short. That's what language devices are all about. The following excerpts use five different devices (personification, alliteration and metonymy, zeugma, metaphor) that offer clear, believable, memorable imagery:

January slipped an icy finger under his collar and down his back. (Jerry Spinelli)

The ballot is stronger than the bullet. (Abe Lincoln)

. . . raising kids and raising hell . . . (Emmy Lou Harris)

Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile (Charles Dickens)

Word Magic introduces (or re-introduces) several dozen powerful devices—via definition and example (excerpted from literature, ublic media, speeches).

Word Magic also offers many published examples of beginnings that hook, middles that compel the reader to stay the course, dialogue and descriptions that sizzle and enchant, and endings that leave the reader wanting more.

The book includes over a hundred sidebars, exercises, and secrets that successful authors use to lift their writing from the ordinary to the extraordinary. The reader may already use some of these techniques without knowing their true value.

Word Magic helps readers to own these writing devices and tools, to illustrate them in their teaching, and to use them in their own writing projects.