Anyone who is serious about becoming a writer, non-fiction or fiction, should get this book, write in it, highlight the points and study it like they are taking his course.
He starts you out with writing to yourself. Then takes you through each step of the process of preparing what you wrote for the reader.
Murray talks to you like are sitting in front of you. You feel like he can hear your questions, answers them, and then shows you what he is talking about.
The most important part of the whole book is Chapter 9, "'Read' as a Writer". He analyzes today's writers as a writer, a major step to really understanding the craft.
Other writing books tell you about practice sessions, structure, and voice. Murray shows you how to do the work.
Yes it is a very...book, but weather it is a textbook or not, it is a book of valuable information for those of us who can't work at the Boston Globe or go to Harvard--yet our passion to write is very real.

Author, Donald M, Murray, practices what he teaches: he writes with a singular voice. I could picture him talking to me in an earnest, friendly way.
I liked the way he led us through his process of writing an article about his grandmother. I also enjoyed reading drafts of his students writings and their finished, successful product. I was enticed to keep reading and therefore learning.
The book has widespread application. My nephew, a college professor, used this as his favorite textbook, yet I adapted the information easily for younger students. It works for both enthusiastic or reticent writers.
I was going to purchase a later edition at our local college bookstore, but found the topics written about were too controversial for my taste and too adult for me to use to teach younger students.
"Write to Learn", 2nd edition, is more than a textbook. It is a LIVING book!

I read this book for a college english class. We used the book for its every facet, and I got a lot out of it. The book is divided into chapter like sections that made the writing process seem less complicated. His personal writing style appealed to me as I read through the chapters on the begining of the writing process. I recomend this book to anyone with the urge to become a better, more creative, writer, and to anyone with the money to do so. This book is a small paper back...i don't understand the price ($35.00!).

Look out Mitch.....you and Tuesdays with Maury are about to be replaced. Dr. Murray delivers his book even better than he did in the classroom. As a former student of his....this book made me laugh....brought a tear to my ear and a lump to my throat. First he taught me to write. Now he teaches me about life as we all face growing older. Thank you for a great read!!

I got to know Donald Murray's writing while living in Massachusetts in the mid-90s. Ever since, I've read his Boston Globe column online, and almost always forward it to people I know, from my teenage son to my father in his 80s. I keep hoping the columns will be collected in a book. In the meantime, there's this wonderful memoir. There is more wisdom in a Donald Murray column than in most of the rest of the paper put together, but it's not WISDOM, delivered from on high and meant to make you feel inadequate. He's had a mixed life - a ghastly childhood, wartime service, professional failure and success, profound grief, enduring friendships, a satisfying marriage - but the book is not just a collection of "and then I" passages. Murray conveys so well how the past is always present, how it can be seen more clearly from the distance that decades provide, and how old age is enriched by that clarity, even as one deals with the inevitable losses and physical decline. His style is conversational-seeming, but without the extraneous matter true conversation always has. The passages about being bullied in boyhood are heartbreaking because there is no anger in his account. He doesn't need to express it; the reader will be furious on his behalf. Murray is a teacher of writing, and as a writer, I find his books on the subject are well worth reading (wish I could have studied with him). Readers will learn a great deal about good writing from "My Twice-Lived Life," as well as a great deal about living.

My Twice-Lived Life has long been in the making. Murray's first idea was to publish a collection of his Boston Globe columns that dealt with aging, the Depression, and World War II. His editor convinced him to look at the subject matter as a memoir, whole and of itself. Good idea.

I've read most of Murray's Boston Globe columns. It is often amazing what he does with these 800 word personal essays. But the memoir gives him more room to explore and develop his subject matter.

We're used to Murray writing about writing. There is a little of that woven throughout the chapters in My Twice-Lived Life. But writing isn't his primary topic here. He writes about the stuff of his life---his childhood, his parents, and World War II, in which he was a paratrooper.

One chapter is titled "The Not-So-Good-Old School Days." I'll use this chapter with my students at Miami University who are studying to be English teachers. In direct opposition to those who deify some past golden time of schooling, Don recounts his own school days and deromantizes that myth. He speaks of teachers today, how they seek further learning in summer programs and professional development, and he writes about how he came to teaching writing.

All those chapters were good reading, but the really courageous chapters are about aging. His wife, Minnie Mae, has had serious medical problems with Parkinson's, diabetes, and breast cancer. Don writes about these times of increasing care-taking clearly, compassionately, and unsentimentally.

In "Fatherhood" he ends the chapter by focusing on the death of his 20 year old daughter of Reyes' Syndrome in the late 1970s. Many of us know bits of this story, because those bits have worked themselves into Don's textbooks and columns, but here we get the most complete rendering and sense-making of that story, including one poem he wrote of Lee's passing.

In the last two chapters Don writes about the extended dying of a neighbor, what he learned as nurses and one doctor tended to her and touched her and helped her to let go. I wished I'd had this book to read two years ago during the time my mother slipped away gradually and inexorably.

A friend of mine in Utah used to say of such writing, "That's it. Write about the tough stuff."

Don Murray does that in My Twice-Lived Life. Reading it made me want to live life well, fully attuned to my senses, aware of the compassionate stories around me, learning how I might approach the coming years with courage and caring and humor.

This was a very enjoyable book to read. The author leads you through the various ways and reasons to edit your work.

As I read the first chapter, I wished for a more compact version of these points, sort of a Cliff Notes approach. But Mr. Murray's expanded approach was certainly more enjoyable and personal.

Although the book is perhaps targeted to a more experienced writer, I underlined many points that I will refer to for help. A beginner might be over-whelmed with all the great techniques on revision, but just the first two chapters alone will yield a dramatic pay-back for his efforts.

The book is interspersed with interviews with other authors and their responses to the author's questions also provide useful information, and add credibility to his points.

"The Craft of Revision" captures the subject of the book. You'll learn more about revising your copy than you probably can use for a long time.

I highly recommend this book.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

Murray is a real writing teacher, full of voice. He practices what he preaches. Craft of revision is a must read for any student of writing.

I stumbled on the first edition of this book in the late seventies while I was preparing to teach a college course in how to teach writing for English and education majors. I don't know about my students but the book transformed my teaching.

This book covers the hows and whys of teaching writing as a process rather than as a product. It comes from a very active publishing writer who writes very well and knows how to teach, even through his very words on the page. From discoverying what to write about, to focusing on an audience, to accomplishing one's purpose from writing, Murray's book is not only instructive in its presentation but is also an excellent model for audience, purpose, and the processes a writer can use to accomplish his/her goals. Revision is Murray's forte. He believes it to be the key to successful writing.

"A Writer Teaches Writing" assumes that the teacher writes. Certainly, Murray does, and so well that all other books on the subject are ecllipsed by this masterpiece.