A review by emiged
How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them by Ben Yagoda

3.0

Mr. Yagoda's How to Not Write Bad reads as a modern update to Strunk & White's classic The Elements of Style. The conversational tone, with liberal dashes of humor thrown in, feels like a friend offering writing advice - straightforward, common-sense advice on how to, well, not write badly. He includes easy guidelines for avoiding common grammatical errors and punctuation mistakes, but also provides some more general suggestions gleaned from his "twenty years of teaching advanced journalism and writing classes at a selective university."

First of all, don't aim too high, he warns.

"Most students, I've found, can't handle writing 'well.' At this point in their writing lives, that goal is simply too ambitious... You have to crawl before you walk, and walk before you run. And you have to be able to put together a clear and at least borderline graceful sentence, and to link that sentence with another one, before you can expect to make like David Foster Wallace... What I'm talking about here is good-enough writing. As with parenting, it isn't necessarily easy to achieve, but it's definitely achievable. And it's a decidedly worthwhile goal."

So, he urges, let's start with the very basics. The simple, one-word prescription for improving your writing is read. Invoking Malcolm Gladwell, Yagoda states that "in order to become an outstanding practitioner in any discipline, you need to devote to it roughly 10,000 hours of practice." (If that's true, I'm a reading guru several times over by now!)

To read the rest of this review, visit my blog Build Enough Bookshelves.