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A review by hammo
The Writer's Diet by Helen Sword
4.0
Short, to the point. Good book.
The core idea seems to be: keep writing simple. It can be simpler than you realize. Stick to SVO structure as much as possible, using lemmas where you can. Spice up your writing with variety, rather than complexity. Create vivid mental animations via concrete nouns and specific, active verbs. Prepositions are garbage. Ad-words (adjectives and adverbs) are mostly garbage. But worst of all are demonstratives and pronouns, which invite ambiguity, fuzzy thinking, and grammatical complexity. Avoid like the plague. Similarly, starting sentences with "there is" often leads to sweeping generalizations. Similarly, avoid.
Expanding on the animation idea, I suspect a good mental framework is this: you are animating a scene in your reader's brain. Each sentence should encode the transition to the next key frame. For example, "left hand moves from here to there", "door opens".
The core idea seems to be: keep writing simple. It can be simpler than you realize. Stick to SVO structure as much as possible, using lemmas where you can. Spice up your writing with variety, rather than complexity. Create vivid mental animations via concrete nouns and specific, active verbs. Prepositions are garbage. Ad-words (adjectives and adverbs) are mostly garbage. But worst of all are demonstratives and pronouns, which invite ambiguity, fuzzy thinking, and grammatical complexity. Avoid like the plague. Similarly, starting sentences with "there is" often leads to sweeping generalizations. Similarly, avoid.
Expanding on the animation idea, I suspect a good mental framework is this: you are animating a scene in your reader's brain. Each sentence should encode the transition to the next key frame. For example, "left hand moves from here to there", "door opens".