ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces writers to blurb writing. Blurbs are short, summative, persuasive texts that manufacture condensed copies of other texts. The chapter provides an introduction to the blurb as a purposive text that allows writers to curate, creatively cite, and appropriate the story and style of novels, films, video games, and other media for potential new consumers. Blurbs are usually 50 to 150 words long, but they can refer to texts of any size, including ten-hour long documentaries and six volume novels. Part of the challenge and pleasure of writing a blurb is figuring out how to approach and exploit this radical disjuncture in scale. While blurbs are entirely referential, from the point of view of the writer they are standalone, purposive texts. The writer of a blurb is writing for an audience that will encounter the text that is being blurbed, so the blurb creates expectations and sets a tone for that future encounter.
