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Title: The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose by Robert and Alan Hodge Graves ISBN: 0-394-50615-4 Publisher: Random House Inc Pub. Date: 01 April, 1979 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Granddaddy of Fisking
Comment: THWACK! Down comes the headmaster's birch-rod on the sensitive knuckles of the bumbling pupil. Botch that passage again, lazybones, and I'll have your hide!
Poet-novelist Robert Graves and historian Alan Hodge have written a delightful book containing a very quirky 126-page critical history of English prose, a few short chapters listing every conceivable principle of clear & graceful writing, followed by some 200 pages of the most carping, anal-retentive editing & revising you've ever seen. Unlike most style-book authors, who criticize hypothetical or anonymous examples of bad prose, Graves & Hodge courageously tackle many of the biggest names of their era (Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Bernard Shaw) and relentlessly pick, pick, pick until the carcass is clean and the bones lie strewn about the lair. Then they put it back together again PROPERLY, the way the author should have done it the first time. As G&H themselves note, the book might as well be subtitled "A Short Cut to Unpopularity".
Of course, if any headmaster ever treated me the way G&H treat their victims, I'd be outraged. Luckily, we are not one of their hapless victims suffering under their harsh tutelage; so, although we wince in sympathy with those being raked over the coals, we can also profit greatly from their chastisement. "The Reader Over Your Shoulder" is the most painstaking and explicit guide ever published on the craft of revising one's prose. Ideal for self-study. But beware: G&H get under your skin and stay there. Even as I write this review I can sense these two meticulous sadists hovering over my shoulder and I ready myself for a thrashing.
This review refers to the out-of-print, unabridged 1944 edition.
Rating: 4
Summary: Worthwile, but . . .
Comment: Robert Graves was one of the best writers of his era, but as this book shows, he was also a Puritan when it came to language. While this book contains many useful tips, it is also pedantic and argumentative. As many of the reviewers noted, Graves and Hodges often illustrate poor writing with examples that seem, in an initial reading, to be sound. Perhaps this merely shows that modern readers are being anaesthetized by bad prose, but I don't think so. If Graves and Hodges loosened up a notch or two they would have written a much better book.
The authors leave the topic of style a little too early for my taste, making the book more of a guide to editing than a guide to writing well.
Still, the book focuses on developing a prose style that is logical, clear, and succinct--the backbone of all good prose.
Rating: 2
Summary: The pot over the shoulder of the kettle. (Or something.)
Comment: I just don't know about this book. ... I got it out of library, started reading it and came across this passage:
"For example: 'Everyone this autumn is wearing amusing antelope-skin gloves.' This may have been true in 1934 of every woman, or almost every woman, of a certain income level in certain London districts; elsewhere it was demonstrably untrue. Fashion notes of this sort ... historians will find them most misleading."
Are these guys for real? Two distinguished authors, one a professor of English literature, apparently totally missing the point and purpose of "Fashion notes". It hardly needs to be said that historians are probably the last people for whom these fashion notes are written, at least if my own experience of historians' dress-sense is anything to go by.
And then there's this example from a letter by an evacuee girl in the second world war:
"'The old cat was on to me yesterday about being careful with my crusts. I bet she's careful enough with hers, the old ... I don't suppose she'd give one to a beggar-child, not if it was starving. I must waste not and want not and put everything in the savings bank ... I must bow down to her as if she was a little tin image. I must get out of this place before I go potty.'"
Here is Graves and Hodge's analysis:
"Great care must be taken to let the reader know just when the ironical note is sounded and just when it ceases ... The three 'I must's here are not parallel. The first is the reported advice of the Old Cat; the second is the writer's ironical deduction...; the third is the writer's practical decision, given without irony."
Now, what exactly do Graves and Hodge intend by presenting this example? Are they saying that the girl's letter does NOT make it clear when she's being ironic? Coz frankly I think it's stunningly clear. To anyone. I think it's a remarkably well written letter, lucid and eloquent -- which is why Graves and Hodge were so easily able to explain the precise function of each 'I must' in the first place.
Graves and Hodge have themselves been guilty of a lack of clarity here -- are they criticising the letter or not? -- and for a book about good style in written English this is unforgivable.
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Title: Simple & Direct by Jacques Barzun ISBN: 0060937238 Publisher: Perennial Currents Pub. Date: 18 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Economical Writing, Second Edition by Deirdre McCloskey ISBN: 1577660633 Publisher: Waveland Pr Inc Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford Language Classics Series) by Henry Fowler, Simon Winchester, H. W. Fowler ISBN: 0198605064 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) by Joseph M. Williams ISBN: 0226899152 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $9.48 |
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Title: On Writing Well, 25th Anniversary : The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (On Writing Well) by William Zinsser ISBN: 0060006641 Publisher: HarperResource Pub. Date: 18 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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