Customer Reviews

Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

With a different title I would have given this book five stars, and I would highly recommend it for newsrooms.

But the majority of the world's writers and editors do not work in newsrooms. They do not write news articles. They write web pages or annual reports for corporations or books on software or educational materials or white papers on technical topics or corporate policy statements or publicity pieces -- or a thousand other kinds of writing, often with audiences just as large as a newspaper's circulation.

The problem with this book, in other words, is not the quality of its entries, but their selection. The book has lots of help for accurate spelling of proper names, but surprisingly little help with topics that today are either ubiquitous or ubiquitous for large swaths of society.

Under "E," for example, you will find an entry for "Elliot, Denholm" with the correct spelling of that actor's name. But you won't find an entry on "email" discussing whether the preferred spelling is hyphenated ("e-mail"). Nor will you find any guidance on "e-commerce" (or eCommerce or E-commerce or any of a number of other variants). You will (thank goodness?) find the correct spelling of "Edgware Road," the London street and Underground station.

Under "H" you will find the correct spellings of Harper's Bazaar, Harpers Ferry, Harper's Magazine and Hartsfield-Jackson (note the hyphen!) Atlanta International Airport. What you won't find is any discussion of the compound "health care" and whether it should ever be written as a solid (as in "universal healthcare").

Also under "H" you will find the correct spellings of Hindu Kush (the Afghan mountain range), Hippocrates (ancient Greek physician), and Al Hirschfield (the American caricaturist). But you won't find a reminder that the correct acronym for the landmark 1996 legislation (provisions of which affect every U.S. hospital, medical facility, health plan, and pharmaceutical company) is HIPAA, not HIPPA (which is how it's pronounced), because the full name of that legislation is the "Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act."

Bottom line: This is not a bad book; it's just a book primarily for newspeople. It should have been promoted as such.

The two stars (rather than none) is for the fact that there are lots of entries that are actually useful (equable vs. equitable; precipitant, precipitate, and precipitous; stanch vs. staunch), and for the most part they are very clearly written. And when an entry calls for advice -- see, for example, the entry on "hopefully" -- Bryson's taste and judgment are sound.

You'll find plenty of factoids (actually, according to this book, a factoid is an untrue fact) about the words we use in Bill Bryson's latest word collection.

This isn't a reference book per se, rather it's designed to be a humorous look at words, and to help certain words stand out in your mind as you go about your writing. This is more of a pre-emptive read: it lets common pitfalls find a perch in your brain BEFORE you need to look them up. There are times when the internet isn't available - like in the middle of a conversation. Remember, it's not just a book of words, but an anecdotal book of words, including spellings, pronunciations, meanings, and etymologies. It'll suprise you to learn what you thought you knew about the words you use.

Don't buy this if you're looking for a comprehensive "Most Commonly Misspelled Words" book. Bryson himself calls this his "personal collection": a potpouri of commonly misspelled words and some interesting facts to go with them. These words reflect Bryson's personality, and for the fans, that's not such a bad thing.

I love this book! I personally just like to go through every once in awhile, sip a few words, mull them over, and if I remember them later on then so much the better. A. Some say that the internet makes books like this obsolete. I'm inclined to disagree. Like any reference book, you can look up what you are intending to look up, or - and here's the beauty of Brysons' book- you can read it for pleasure and find all sorts of creative entries you would never think to look up in the first place.

If you liked Dictionary of Troublesome Words, or you're one who likes interesting facts about the words we do use, I'd recommend this book.

This is one of those little works that may or may not appeal to the average reader, and may or may not live up to the expectations of its title. I have a very large shelf of reference books, dictionaries, and the like setting above my desk. I also have my computer in front of me (obviously, as I am using it now). A small 300 plus page book is in no way going to replace these books or my temperamental machine, or even come close. When I purchase this little volume, I did not have the unrealistic expectations that in was the beginning and end of all reference books. Rather, I enjoy Bryson's writing. I enjoy trivia. I enjoy having little books around that I can pick up, read a few lines and enjoy them and learn something to boot. This work fulfilled my personal needs quite well. I seldom take anything Bryson writes all that serious, but I personally think he is funny and I do enjoy his quirky, curious mind.

This, according to the author's statement is a persona list of words, names, places, etc. that he has encountered over the years. It addresses the usage of these words; it gives a brief one line description of places, people and things. It also, as the author points out, addresses words that are sort of at the edge of your mind, i.e. you know of them, sort of, you know of their usage, sort of, but you are not quite sure. As an example, and this pertains to just me, Bryson tells us the difference between "douse" and "dowse." Now I know these two words, but to be frank, was not real sure of the difference when I really stopped to think of it. This book quickly explains it in just twelve words. Neat! I have always, for some reason had problems with the usage of "its" verses "it's." (I know, I am an illiterate clod, no use in pointing it out). Bryson explains their usage in a quick, pain free, three lines. This is sure nicer than digging through The Little, Brown Handbook, and trying to figure out what in the world they are talking about.

If you spend your hard earned money on a short work such as this and expect to receive an all inclusive reference book, then you probably deserve to be parted from your cash. If you buy this simply for the entertainment value, then you will probably get your monies worth.

This book added nothing to my personal writing library. It just weakly covered some nooks and crannies better covered in other refernce works. I rate this an "N" for not worth the price or the time.

BRYSON'S DICTIONARY FOR WRITERS AND EDITORS BY BILL BRYSON: Bestselling author Bill Bryson has already amassed quite a career for himself with successful travel writing books like A Walk in the Woods and In a Sunburned Country, as well as books on literature and language like The Mother Tongue and Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, and even attempting to present a concise history of science with A Short History of Nearly Everything; Bryson now returns with Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors.

He admits in his preface that it is a personal collection, "built over thirty years as a writer and editor in two countries," and that some of the obscure references and definitions may not be useful to many, like the name of the Sydney district Woolloomooloo, or that the residence of the Danish Royal Family in Copenhagen is the Amalienborg Palace. Nevertheless, Bryson addresses many of the common issues that make a writer hesitate - amoral or immoral? Effect or affect?. He dispenses with the dictionary's phonetic alphabet, instead providing pronunciation help where necessary; as well as cross indexing so that in the example mentioned above, the entry can be found filed under both amoral and immoral for the writer's and editor's ease.

Bryson's Dictionary is filled with innumerable references and spellings for authors, book titles, series, philosophers, scientists . . . you name it, making them even easier to find than looking up on the Internet. Bryson also includes appendices of punctuation and its definitions, words ending in -able and -ible, a list of the world's airports and their codes, the different currencies of the world, conversion tables, and an extensive glossary on grammar.

Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors is the ideal book for most people who do any sort of reading and writing, whether it is the freshman heading off for college for the first time, the freelance writer looking to get published, or the retired crossword addict looking for exact spelling at their fingertips.

[...]

The book is a dictionary about difficult or strange expressions and names. It's a new edition of Bryson's 2002 "Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words". It's very nice written (typically Bryson's style), full of cynical explanations that will make you laugh and enormously useful when writing English texts.
As a German speaking human being, I have to admit that there are quite a lot of misspelled German words... But this unfortunately seems to be quite often the case with Americans writing in German (... and vice versa...)

This book is FUN and so helpful. Keep it by my bed and read a few pages before falling asleep. I keep learning more wonderful and unique facts about language, about life, about so many things. Try it. You'll love it!

May D

According to the copyright page, "earlier editions" of this book were published in England as "The Penguin Dictionary for Writers and Editors" more than 15 years ago. According to Bryson's preface, it's intended as a "quick, concise guide to the problems of English spelling and usage most commonly encountered by writers and editors" and "is a personal collection, built up over thirty years..." That's all well and good, but since its original publication, a little thing called the internet has come along and rendered a good deal of the contents rather superfluous. For example, it's hard to imagine that anyone seeking the correct spelling of "suggestible" or "sulfur" would turn to page 322 of this book to learn the proper sequence of letters. For one thing, it would be vastly inefficient to turn to Bryson's "personal collection" every time a spelling question arose on the off chance his spelling problems matched yours. More to the point, there are any number of reliable online dictionaries one could use instead. Similarly, the book is full of names and one-line bios of famous and semi-famous people (ranging on page 323 from Nobel prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi to Patrick Swayze). Again, why hope that Bryson has an entry on a particular person as opposed to a quick check online at any number of reliable sources? And so on, from various foreign-language terms to geographic locations, abbreviations, etc. The only area where Bryson "adds value" is those entries which evoke a more lengthy discussion of usage, however he's already written a book on usage (Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words), so one might as well rely on that (or any number of other excellent usage guides). On the whole, this book doesn't appear to hold much utility for the average writer or editor (both of which I have been), whose bookshelves and internet bookmarks will likely already contain the tools to address any of the entries in this book. Rather, it appears to be an ill-advised attempt by the publisher to cash in on the Bryson brand.

No idea why this was even published except that anything with Mr. Bryson's name will sell. Simply useless.