About book Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know About Writing (2000)
* * * * 1/2An excellent guide on writing from a very witty writer. The advice she provides is common sense: use small words, choose strong verbs, vary your sentence length, know your audience, and so on. She also acknowledges when some of her tips might not be as helpful: for example, if you're writing a boring scientific paper, the expected style is long sentences, indirect prose, and five-dollar words. The following anecdote brings that point home:My husband once helped a French scientist translate a research paper into English. It emerged so clear, simple, and direct that no scientific journal wanted it. The paper had to be rewritten in formal academese -- dense, impersonal, and indirect -- before it could be published.The book is packed with examples from famous writers to support her arguments. In the chapter on comedy, she talks about magnifying a single flaw and mining it for comedy gold. The example she chooses is Mark Twain's skewering of James Fenimore Cooper's literary tricks, particularly his use of the broken twig. (I would point out that in Last of the Mohicans, Duncan doesn't get himself, David and the two girls captured by stepping on a dry twig -- he decides to shoot at Magua (their deceitful guide). Now THAT was a stupid thing to do.)Word nerds of all sorts will love this book as well for its wonderful puns that the author herself enjoys a good deal, particularly the Tom Swifties, which are a remark by the fictional Tom Swift, followed by the punchline: an adverb."That's the last time I'll put my arm in a lion's mouth," said Tom offhandedly.Other excellent chapters include the one on logic, "Critique of Poor Reason", one on numbers and percentages, and one on how to avoid writing wimpy sentences. The chapter on revision was especially pertinent to my line of work, where I have to revise my own writing. All in all, this is a great book. With Words Fail Me by your side, your words will not fail you.
** This is a QUICK REVIEW of my thoughts on the book **Very easy to read. Doesn’t feel old or dated despite being written a dozen years ago. A practical and humorous approach to improving your writing, whether it be fiction or non-fiction.Has lots of tips (with loads of simple and practical examples) on how to rearrange a perplexing or ambiguous sentence so the meaning becomes crystal clear. This is especially helpful when there are two or more people in a sentence and the ‘his’ (or ‘hers’) get tangled up and you’ve no idea who did what to whom! (Example: ‘Bill said Fred broke his nose.’ It’s unclear whether Bill said Fred’s nose was broken, or Fred was said to have broken Bill’s nose. This wonderful book has lots of suggestions how to easily restructure vague sentences like these so the meaning becomes clear.)Also has a quick grammar overview which helps remove the mystery from such puzzlers as the correct usage of ‘you and I’ vs. ‘you and me’ (yes, they can BOTH be correct in different circumstances). Also explains the critical difference between ‘twice as many’ and ‘two times more than’, as well as other common mathematical bloopers.In summary, it’s a good, solid, no-hyperbole guide to writing sensible English with just the right amount of humour to make it enjoyable as well as instructive.The only caveat I will make is this isn’t really a book which tells you HOW to write (e.g. structure, pace, tone, viewpoint, etc) but rather, how to FIX what you’ve written once you’ve written it. There are bucketloads of other books which tell you how to write, but this is the best book I’ve read which tells you how to correct, edit and improve your writing.Content Rating: PGThere are one or two slight rude or sexual references but nothing I found offensive.
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Back when I was still a newbie magazine writer, this book served as my intro to non-academic writing. Not only does O'Conner humorously tackle the major grammatical errors that writers make, she also dedicates a few chapters to issues such as thought organization, research and finding your writing routine.This book is simple (and painless) enough for anyone to read - not just (beginner) professional writers but also anyone whose job requires him/her to do a lot of writing.Seasoned writers may find this too basic for their needs.
—Emily Dy
