Review by Booklist Review
Sir Harold Evans (The American Century, 1998) has devoted his life to making clear, concise, and important decisions about words. Formerly the editor of the Times and the Sunday Times in London and president of Random House in the U.S., Evans built a storied career of maximizing the power of language. This book is his manual of style. His writing is a warning against specific traps that reporters, politicians, and everyday speakers fall into, while explaining new or complex concepts. He cautions readers to beware the fog of misunderstood mortgages, the serpentine language of Social Security, and commands too vague for life-and-death military action. Evans explores how rhetoric crashed the American housing market in 2008 and elected a populist American president in 2016. The book reads like the journalistic equivalent of Stephen King's On Writing (2000), a memoir of crafting fiction. Rife with specifics, and balanced between narrative and information, Evans' book belongs in the hands of any interested party looking for truth and clarity in the words around us.--Eathorne, Courtney Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Every writer needs an editor, and British-born best-selling author Evans (My Paper Chase) has filled that role for numerous journalists and other nonfiction writers. -Evans's prolific career spans British and American publications such as the Sunday Times (editor, 1967-81), Atlantic Monthly, and U.S. News & World Report. His investigative work is also the subject of the documentary Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime. Mixing straightforward, sentence-level revision strategies with higher-level analyses of complex texts, this latest work balances critique with celebration. Some of the advice covers familiar topics (e.g., the passive voice, nominalizations); other subjects include language choices, which are contextualized in relation to historical, political, and social movements and events. In addition to examples from various media outlets, White House reports and legislative texts come under scrutiny. The idea of "clear" writing guides the suggestions, analysis, and revisions of exemplary and less-effective prose. VERDICT A fascinating look into the processes that made Evans one of the most respected journalists of the past century.-Meagan Storey, Virginia Beach © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Although this is yet another how-to, self-help text for would-be writerswith some of the usual hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing about the abuses of English todaythis one merits more attention because it comes from the keyboard of a celebrated journalist and editor.Reuters editor at large Evans (My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, 2009), who has been an editor of the Times and the Sunday Times, chronicles the many aspects of writing and language that annoy him. Some of his principal targets include obfuscation, misused and/or abused words, long introductory phrases or clauses, overlong sentences, clichs, and grammatical stumbles (dangling participles, superfluous adverbs, and their foul kin. The author is mellower about ending sentences with prepositions (noting this was a nonsensical proscription from the beginning) and sentence fragments. A sentence "expresses a complete thought," he reminds us, and complete thoughts do not always feature a subject and verb. Evans begins with a fine chapter that could stand alone: an overview of what he's doing and why. He moves along to some sections about the abuses of those in the business, legal, political, and educational worlds. In the penultimate section, the author offers examples of writers in the right, Roger Angell, and Barbara Demick among them. In between is a mixture of portions of published texts that Evans re-edits for our edification; lists (sometimes too long) of clichs, phrases that writers can easily shorten, and words that writers misuse/confusee.g., "appraise and "apprise, "insidious" and "invidious." Readers may take some smug delight in the authors' own use of the passive voice and his pluralizing of Humpty (as in Dumpty) with "Humpties" (does Billy become Billies?). But who's perfect? Thoughtful ruminations about current language mixed with praise for clarity and disdain for murkiness. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
