《与死者协商：一位作家论写作》中玛格丽特以自己的成长及写作的亲身经历去探究作家这一行当的本质以及作家的自我定位，《与死者协商：一位作家论写作》讲述到底作家为了什么目的而进行文学创作？作家本身是具有二重性的，一半过日子，最终死去；另一半写作，变成一个名字，与肉体无关，但与作品相连。置身于柴米油盐的琐碎生活中的作者与作为其化身的书中的灵魂的关系到底为何？写作根本的目的是什么，作者进行文学创作是为了艺术献身还是为了支付房租？作家与外界社会的干系到底为何？作家如何处理艺术形象与现实的差距？作家为谁写作？书本介于作家和读者之间，其功能或说职责是什么？依写书人的看法，书应该做些什么？读者阅读时，作家在哪里？我们每个人的人生，无非都是走向死亡的过程，而写作却能跨越生与死的界限，作品到底如何沟通逝者与生者的思想？

Modern academia is increasingly competitive yet the writing style of social scientists is routinely poor and continues to deteriorate. Are social science postgraduates being taught to write poorly? What conditions adversely affect the way they write? And which linguistic features contribute towards this bad writing? Michael Billig’s witty and entertaining book analyses these questions in a quest to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong with the way social scientists write. Using examples from diverse fields such as linguistics, sociology and experimental social psychology, Billig shows how technical terminology is regularly less precise than simpler language. He demonstrates that there are linguistic problems with the noun-based terminology that social scientists habitually use – ‘reification’ or ‘nominalization’ rather than the corresponding verbs ‘reify’ or ‘nominalize’. According to Billig, social scientists not only use their terminology to exaggerate and to conceal, but also to promote themselves and their work.

The popular, brief rhetoric that treats writing as thinking, "Writing Analytically, International Edition", offers a sequence of specific prompts that teach students across the curriculum how the process of analysis and synthesis is a vehicle for original and well-developed ideas. This book's governing premise is that learning to write well means learning to use writing in order to think well. To that end, the strategies of this book describe thinking skills that employ writing. This book treats writing as a tool of thought - a means of undertaking sustained acts of inquiry and reflection.

本书涵盖写作的几个步骤，涉及如何准备、找到创意和故事、找到适合的形式、完成作品，帮助读者激发充满创意的作家生活。书中给出了非常多的建议，富有启发性和指导意义，是一本很经典的写作指导书。