Customer Reviews

Write Tight: How to Keep Your Prose Sharp, Focused and Concise

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As a beginning opinion columnist I quickly learned that wordiness can kill your column. How do you get the greatest effect with only 700 words? Brohaugh's book tells you.

The principles he discusses in Write Tight apply to columnists, reporters, technical writers, or novelists. Whether you write for fun or profit, his advice will make your work more impactful. The world is full of books on better writing, so why is Brohaugh's book special? It's actually fun to read.

His illustrations of wordiness are often hilarious even when his heavy shoe stomps your toes. Rather than just list poor choices of words, grammar, and style, he weaves them into his writing to show how silly and wasteful they are.

If you write, you need to Write Tight.

If you haven't read the MLA, or Chicago Manual of Style, you gotta read this book! No writer should be without a copy. It reads like an expansion of The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. If you can find a copy, buy it. It will make an excellent gift for any writer.

Former editor of "Writer's Digest" magazine William Brohaugh presents Write Tight: How To Keep Your Prose Sharp, Focused And Concise, a practical guide to focusing one's message with grace, simplicity, and power, especially in today's attention-span deprived world of sound bites and distractions. From removing unnecessary syllables to excising gratuitous chapters, Write Tight identifies sixteen types of "flabby" writing (which says too little with too much verbage), offers "verbal aerobics" to hone one's skills, and even offers nonverbal devices such as sidebars and checklists to streamline one's manuscripts. Write Tight is a supremely valuable, "must-have" for aspiring writers in all fields from prose to nonfiction, journalistic copy, screenwriting and so much more.

I read the previous edition of Write Tight in college for a writing class. Though I read many writing books during those years but this is the only one I keep rereading and referring to since I graduated six years ago.

The book does a wonderful job of showing how verbose any type of writing can become and that, if done correctly, tight writing does a much better job of sharing the same message. This book is a must for anyone who's looking to write clear, concise copy. And the new edition is even better than the old one!

Please note the book already assumes you have a good knowledge of grammar and sentence structure and doesn't really show you "how to write" but rather, "how to write better."

no, i'm not trying to one-up the previous reviewer but i am not kidding. i'm a computer programmer- i wanted a book to help me better document manuals and perhaps give me a few writing tips. i'm on page 38 of this book and it is by far the most useful, insighful, practical writing book i've ever read. why wasn't this used when i was in high school????!!!!
if you ever need to write an email, a letter for your child's school, your grandmother, or some fancy newspaper article, this is a THE book you NEED!

This books is great. I'm a kitchen-sink writer. I want to make sure everything is in there to make my point. When I know the material, I write too much, and have to cut entire pages the night before the deadline. Write Tight helps in general by shortening your writing and cutting out the fluff. Even better is that it forces you to evaluate each word or phrase to find the one most appropriate to your meaning. It's got plenty of examples of before-and-after pieces, as well as lists of common substitutions. Well worth the money if you ever plan to write anything.

I found this book tedious, and guilty of the sins that it complains about - it mercilessly labors the bleedin' obvious. I suspect that form and structure are concepts that have never entered Mr. Brohaugh's head, and that he would reduce a Shakespearean sonnet to a series of advertising slogans. I finally abandoned it, 60 pages in, after being told that "careful" is an adverb and that "simple" is a synonym for "simplistic".

~Write Tight: How to Keep Your Prose Sharp, Focused and Concise~ is a helpful style guide for writers. Though, possessed of a plethora of words in my lexicon, I find that my writing sometimes has a tendency to get clotted with verbose. (Pun intended.) The needed antidote is the prescriptive wisdom of this book. Following its guidelines, allows a writer to produce a more crisp, fluid, lucid and sharper quality of prose. All things considered, this is an excellent book!