Customer Reviews

Understanding Style: Practical Ways to Improve Your Writing

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I'm a mature student of creative writing and have been struggling to improve the quality of my writing, as opposed to my creativity. I came across this book through Amazon and I'm staggered by how valuable it has proved to be. The book is simple in format, there are three sections: "Good and bad writing"; "Choosing accurate, effective words"; and "Crafting clear, pleasing and coherent sentences." Each has several chapters in it which provide exercises and examples that help your prose to work, simply and clearly. This is not a heavyweight grammatical textbook, it is a straightforward workbook that will improve anyone's English: employee, student, creative, professional, academic, manager or executive. Joe Glaser has also created a web site where the exercises from the book can be downloaded, plus there are other links etc. to recommended style pages. Writing is important to how we think, clear writing helps produce creative, effective thinking - this is a book that will actually help your writing, and your communication.

If you just want to grasp the gist of the book, take a look at the "POINTS TO REMEMBER" at the end of each chapter. I think they are well written for everyone to understand easily.

You would definitely learn a lot if you could digest all the examples and practice all the exercises provided in the book. Even though you couldn't, like me, you can still get concrete ideas about some main features of good English, which can make you more alert to how well, or poor, people are expressing themselves, and also more alert to the way you are expressing yourself. I believe once we are aware of those good features, we can try our best to pick them up and integrate in our writing style.

Nevertheless, it does take patience and basic linguistic knowledge (for those who learn English as a secondary language) to truely appreciate the full content of the book.

I found this book very helpful, for the most part. Although exercises are well-intended, the constant references to the author's website are annoying. It assumes the reader should be online at all times. Even then, the website provides answers for only few exercises, not all of them. I gave up on the exercises altogether. Nevertheless, I found other information helpful. It's a nice reference book. I recommend it to those who want to improve their writing.