Steering the Craft: a Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K Le Guin
Published 2015 · 60,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is Steering the Craft: a Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story to read?
Steering the Craft: a Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story scores 21 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Le Guin writes plain, conversational English and explains each craft term as she uses it. Her vocabulary sits close to Beach Read's accessibility, with only a few grammatical terms such as syntax and parataxis to learn.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Her sentences are clear and varied, and she deliberately demonstrates the long sentences she teaches. The prose stays far easier than the Dickens and Woolf passages she quotes.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Each point is tied to a concrete passage or a writing exercise. The book is practical advice about sentences and scenes, much like Atomic Habits in how it anchors ideas in examples.
- Information density: 34 out of 100
- A short book with a single idea per chapter and little filler. Readers take in a modest amount of craft material per page, then pause to do the exercise.
How Steering the Craft: a Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story is regarded
Steering the Craft: a Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story holds a literary regard score of 57 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.