Customer Reviews

The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose

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If your students refuse to learn how important it is to focus on INDIVIDUAL WORDS-- if they insist on thinking that it is sufficient to 'get their point across in a rough way'-- if their sentences are as a result sometimes nonsensical, suggest this book. And then make them read it-- including the appendix at the back.

Among other valuable aspects, the book uses examples of bad writing from famous authors-- simultaneously reassuring the student that a mistake can happen to the best of us, and reminding the student that vigilance is always necessary.

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.

This is my favorite book. For years I struggled as a writer, unnecessarily as I now know, because I had never been taught the principles of clear communication.

This book teaches those principles. I recommend it to any writer who is trying to improve his work.

This book teaches a hard-core discipline of writing. To follow its principles will not only improve your writing ability, it will make you a better person.

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.

I thought this book was helpful. Its method is straightforward and holds both reader and writer to an exceptionally high standard. Part 1 consists of laying out of the history of English prose, and then the discussion of the principles (or rules) of what Graves and Hodges consider good writing.
Some of this is pretty old hat, but Graves and Hodges are never boring in their writing or in the examples they give of the traps writers are capable of falling into. Basically what matters most to them is clarity and logical consistancy. Graceful prose, a much harder quality to explain, is dealt with much more swiftly and generally.
Part 2 is perhaps the most informative, exhausting, and frustrating part, where numerous examples of writing are painstakingly disected showing the principles of part one in ruthless action. Personally I found this section a disappointment. Often I took issue with their critiques. It wasn't that they were "wrong," but that I felt the authors were deliberately missing what was being written in order to score points. They would take issue with what was being said, feeling its meaning was unclear, but when they finally got around to saying what they thought the author intended, it was the very meaning I had understood when I read the passage without their comment. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the critique of the sample from T.S. Eliot, where I felt Graves and Hodges (though I expect Graves alone here) were being obtuse and extreme. Sadly, this section was not as helpful as I hoped. I came away feeling that ultimitely no one could possible read or write at the level demanded by the authors.
Still, I would recommend this book -- if you can find a copy. It is a strong tonic for the loose prose written today. Sometimes it is the over stated argument that wakes you up. Just take it with a grain of salt -- much like Graves' "The White Goddess."

When I was a college student in China back in the early 80's, an American teacher brought us this book and made us read and follow it to the letter. Boy did I ever hate a college teacher: The first couple of months of her writing class turned out be excruciating to every student despite her seemingly simplistic motto: "Say what you mean, and mean what you say!" But her guidance ---- and this book's teaching quickly made its mark. Now, after 25 years in both public and private sectors, I have to say this book was by far THE most helpful tool in developing and improving my writing.

Too bad I forgot that American teacher's name. She was not very tall, was in her late 40's or early 50's and teaching in the smallest college in Beijing. If you are reading this review, A BIG, BIG THANK-YOU for teaching me how to write and for introducing me this book!!!

If you are serious about improving your writing, please read this book and practice its preaching. After a few months / years, you will never write the same way again.

With only a high-school education in English, and a style gained by reading excerpts from cereal boxes, a person can become a master of prose by seriously studyng two books. Both were written fifty or so years ago but clarity in thought and style were in vogue even in the times of Euclid. The first book is not easy to read but is really fun and so well-written it sings--"The King's English" by H.W. Fowler and F.G.Fowler. (Don't accept any interloper's revision of the book!) The second book, and it will give a writer courage,is the present one: "The Reader over Your Shoulder," Graves and Hodge.

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.