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I enjoy Ben Yagoda’s columns in the New York Times now and then. He’s one of the few people who can write an essay about commas and make me laugh. When I was offered a review copy of his newest book How to Not Write Bad I couldn’t say no. I own and have read plenty of books that promise to tell me how to write well. I even own that perennial classic by William Zinsser. But I have never read a book that offered to teach me how to not write bad.
There is a difference, isn’t there, between writing well and not writing bad? Learning how to write well suggests I might be able to rival Strunk and White just by following their rules. Not writing bad says I can feel confident I won’t embarrass myself in public. I don’t really care to write like Strunk and White but I do care about not looking the fool. Yagoda guesses that he has graded somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 pieces of student work in the last twenty years. In How to Not Write Bad he proposes to use his experience to provide us with the fifty most common mistakes he has seen and ways we can avoid them. Simple.
Even simpler is Yagoda’s short answer on how to not write bad: read. Good writers are nearly always good readers who read widely. One can absorb a lot about writing just by reading it. It is also a good idea to read your own work out loud; it won’t fix everything but it will save you from a clunker or two.
No one is going to buy a whole book just to be told to read more and following his short answer Yagoda is kind enough to include the long answer. Those fifty or so pesky and all too common mistakes people make take up the bulk of the book. Starting small with numbers, capitalization and italics, we move swiftly to punctuation then up the food chain to words and grammar. You are probably familiar with many of them, I know I was. Commas and comma splices, semicolons and colons, em dashes and parentheses, their mysteries all laid bare in a short and painless way. Of course there are dangling modifiers to puzzle over and verb tenses to to untangle and prepositions to end sentences with. Yagoda also provides frequent reminders of why we should love our print dictionaries and not trust spell-check.
The final portion of the book focuses on things that aren’t necessarily mistakes but are definitely unforgivably sloppy. Here we have discussions about cliches, qualifiers and intensifiers, long and Latinate versus short and Anglo-Saxon, and ambiguity. The section on ambiguity is a hoot. Examples include headlines from respected newspapers, “British Left Waffles on Falklands” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge” and the classic Groucho line, “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas.”
Yagoda focuses on the nuts and bolts mainly at the word and sentence level. There is brief discussion on tone and paragraphs that is just enough to be suggestive but not enough to be big picture useful. Throughout the book he encourages us to be mindful writers: stop the multi-tasking, pay attention, figure out what you want to say and then make every word in the sentence serve a purpose. Good advice I too often ignore.
How to Not Write Bad is useful and even fun reading. Yagoda’s light and humorous approach goes much farther than dour finger shaking that makes you feel stupid and ashamed. The book is good for students, bloggers, and anyone who wants to work on not writing bad. This is one I definitely will be keeping at hand on my reference shelf.
Thank you for this review. I have a page for “Books on Writing” on my blog “A Way With Words”. I’ll have to check this out to see if it’s a worthy inclusion.
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indytony, you bet! It’s a good and useful book.
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“The British left waffles on Falklands” will have me chuckling for awhile.
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That looks like a book worth getting hold of. Ben Yagoda seems to have found a way of writing about usage that is readable and non intimidatory. I liked Stephen King’s book about writing very much too and, of course, Orwell’s Politics And The English Language. Yagoda’s title is brilliant.
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Ian, definitely readable and not intimidating. His explanations are clear and what he says makes sense. King’s is a good book too. His and Yagoda’s would sit nicely on a shelf together.
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Anne Camille, I know, isn’t that marvelous? And to think it was an actual news headline!
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Would have been even funnier (though wouldn’t make sense) if it were the Belgians that waffled!
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Anne Camille, heh, the Belians waffling is just too perfect to hope for!
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I’ve added How to Not Write Bad to my ever growing TBR wish list! Thanks for the recommendation Stefanie π
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Helen, grow list grow! π
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Love. When I was growing up and learning to write, I was often astounded by how many people could not hear how bad their own writing was… then I realized that those were usually the people who did not read at all. Even if you’re not a stellar writer (which I am not), if you read a lot, you can “hear” when something sounds decent.
Best headline I ever saw was when I was working at the city newspaper… in an inadvertent slipup, a headline for a story about the decline in college grades was as follows: “College Students Is Are Getting Stupider”
Oops. Proofreading is also an undervalued skill!
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wherethereisjoy, exactly, even if you aren’t a stellar writer if you read a lot you are much better than the people who don’t read. It’s the best osmosis learning I think. And that is a most excellent headline gaffe!
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I’m going to look for this–always a good idea to keep improving. Of course some days all I can hope for is indeed not to embarrass myself! π
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Danielle, ha! I know about those kinds of days! They usually extend far beyond just writing too.
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it sounds irresistible!
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Carrie, not sure about irresistible but it is definitely worth the price of admission π
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Sounds like great fun. I’ll have to look for a copy.
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Emily, I wouldn’t say great fun, but there is fun to be had π
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This sounds like such a fun look at writing. I must confess I adore those foolish newspaper headlines. There used to be a collection of them pinned to the wall in the photocopying room in my old university department. I particularly liked: ‘Iraqi Head Seeks Arms’ and ‘Homicide Victims Rarely Speak To Police’. Heh.
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Litlove, it does make the painful bits interesting and sometimes fun. How fun there was a collection of news headlines in your old uni department. I love “βIraqi Head Seeks Arms” it almost made me choke on the water I was sipping when I read your comment!
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You’ve convinced me, I went over and added it immediately to my “books to buy” list on Amazon.com. π
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Carl, I hope you find it fun and useful!
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I’ve wanted to read this book since your February review and last week it was my turn to borrow it. Yagoda offers apt levity as I groan and take notes from every page. I cower in the face of commas.
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Oh, so glad you are enjoying it! Don’t let commas intimidate you!
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