The Writer's Rules: The Power Of Positive Prose--how To Create It And Get It Published [Hardcover]

Helen G. Brown (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 5, 1998

Helen Gurley Brown, previously US Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan, guides the readers to the clear, ente rtaining writing style that has made Cosmopolitan the world'' s number one magazine for women. '

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Despite her meteoric rise from office secretary to longtime editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, Helen Gurley Brown is an odd fit as an author of a book about writing. The Writer's Rules is full of dot-dot-dots and blah, blah, blahs, exclamation points and emphatic italics. "How early can you be in love with written words?" Brown asks in the book's introduction. "Early, of course, but for me it wasn't what other people wrote that intrigued me but what I wrote myself ... baby ego!" Brown's effusive writing seems best suited to the sex-and-the-single-girl prose of Cosmopolitan or to personal correspondence (which makes sense: the author has been an avid letter writer, she says, since the age of 6). The 50 simple rules around which the book is organized are part Cosmo guidelines and part Strunk and White. They range from reminders to "write the way you talk" and "stick to one tense" to an appeal not to be "relentlessly depressing."

The best chapter in this book, and the one clearly closest to the author's heart, is the one on letter writing. Here, Brown divulges her secrets to writing thank-you notes, effective complaint letters (be reasonable and slip in a touch of flattery), job-application letters, fan mail, condolence letters, and even love letters. Brown herself writes dozens of letters a week. The late composer Burton Lane, we are told, "smiled all day" after receiving a note from her. And while Woody Allen sent along a bottle of 1990 Château Lafitte-Rothschild with his note of thanks for a dinner party she threw for him and Soon-Yi, Elizabeth Taylor didn't write "boo" when Brown sent her an antique brooch. --Jane Steinberg

From Publishers Weekly

Drawing on her experience as Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief for three decades, Brown begins this mish-mash with 50 rules to help writers turn out clear, succinct, lively prose. Many of her rules are borrowed or adapted from Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style, as she freely admits; some rules are questionable generalizations ("Place the most important words at the sentence's end"), and at times her advice is simplistic nonsense ("Make your first sentence and whole lead paragraph as clever as possible..."). Next she offers sensible if familiar advice on how to get magazine articles or books published, along with sample proposals. She shamelessly pads this perfunctory primer with sample resumes and job application letters, plus pointers on writing love letters, fan letters, condolence and thank-you letters. Ironically, her prose is pockmarked by the cutesy locutions, breathless interjections, annoying parenthetical asides, would-be witticisms and inappropriate slang or colloquialisms that are trademarks of her style and of the gossipy, rhetorical, narcissistic voice of ads for that certain magazine, Cosmo.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (August 5, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688159060
• ISBN-13: 978-0688159061
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,408,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars this guide was semi-helpful, June 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Writer's Rules: The Power Of Positive Prose--how To Create It And Get It Published (Hardcover)

this book was written in "Cosmo-speak", which really isn't much of a surprise since Brown was the editor of Cosmo. In addition, Brown gets most of the writing tips for this book from other writers' guides. It would probably be best just to buy the other writing guides that she makes reference to. She does share some interesting stories, though, but nothing relatively important to helping someone with their writing skills.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A practical and simple book to help a first time writer!, November 15, 2000

By 

Susan Lee Foreman (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Writer's Rules: The Power Of Positive Prose--how To Create It And Get It Published (Hardcover)

Although this was the first book I have read on the subject of getting published, it was very easy to follow and gave a lot of encouragement and support for a novice writer. Definitely a good start on the road to writing professionally.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Huge Surprise, November 4, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Writer's Rules: The Power Of Positive Prose--how To Create It And Get It Published (Hardcover)

I admit it: Helen Gurley Brown has long struck me as being silly and sex mad. I expected nothing when I picked up this book and was pleasantly surprised. There is excellent advice in this book for the begining writer. In fact I now reccomend it to students of the writing class I teach.