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The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "We can turn to etymology to understand the origin of the meaning of style-but only at the risk of being seriously misled..." (more)
Key Phrases: Ben Yagoda, New Yorker, Henry James (more...)

4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Yagoda begins his penetrating, historically based inquiry into the allure of literature with a deceptively simple premise: "Style matters." But what exactly do we mean by style? And how does style relate to voice? Yagoda, the notably lucid author of About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (2000), establishes two stylistic poles: the "transparent" prose advocated by Strunk and White's Elements of Style and style as self-expression and the embodiment of a moral viewpoint. Seeking understanding of a "middle style" that combines the best of both, Yagoda--splendidly well read, inquisitive, and perceptive--spoke with 40 diverse writers about style and voice, and excerpts from his interviews with the likes of Harold Bloom, Toni Morrison, Elmore Leonard, Gish Jen, Dave Barry, Ann Beattie, and Billy Collins enliven his cogent running commentary with revelations of everything from whether writers use pens or computers to how a writer strikes a balance between spoken and written language. In sum, Yagoda has forged a sophisticated and scintillating writer's resource in sync with today's thriving MFA writing programs. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"...offers not only the author’s amazingly informative narrative, but points us toward...the trial and error inherent in creativity." -- Ann Beattie

"...the right mix of seriousness and wit, anecdote and insight." -- Billy Collins

"A shrewd, welcome meditation on literary style… that rarest of tomes: a splendidly written book about writing." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"A stylish exploration of developing a distinctive voice and writing style." -- Chicago Tribune

"Ben Yagoda [is] the best kind of close reader, attentive to writerly choices that most of us take for granted." -- Wall Street Journal

"This entertaining and instructive book should be part of any writing collection." -- Library Journal

"This is an ingenious and memorable exploration of writing’s soul..." -- Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo

"[Ben Yagoda] is witty and offhandedly erudite and unafraid to read between the lines..." -- Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler and Secret Parts of Fortune

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Harper (June 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0066214173
ISBN-13: 978-0066214177
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds

Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #660,403 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
We can turn to etymology to understand the origin of the meaning of style-but only at the risk of being seriously misled. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Ben Yagoda, New Yorker, Henry James, John Updike, Joan Didion, Billy Collins, James Wolcott, Jonathan Raban, Tom Wolfe, Cynthia Ozick, David Thomson, United States, Greil Marcus, John Lukacs, Judith Thurman, Nicholson Baker, Kurt Vonnegut, Pauline Kael, Donald Barthelme, Harold Bloom, Margaret Drabble, Peter Carey, Raymond Carver, Virginia Woolf, Bill Bryson

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 100 books:

Oxford Fowler's Modern English Usage Dictionary by H. W. Fowler on 5 pages
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom on page 159, and Back Matter
Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer on page 108, and page 112
Great Expectations (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
A Biographical Dictionary Of Film: Third Edition by David Thomson on page 78, and Back Matter

See all 100 books this book cites

8 books cite this book:

Writing Theology Well: A Rhetoric for Theological And Biblical Writers by Lucretia B. Yaghjian on 5 pages
The Power of Grammar: Unconventional Approaches to the Conventions of Language by Mary Ehrenworth on 5 pages
The Sound on the Page: Great Writers Talk about Style and Voice in Writing by Ben Yagoda in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Front Matter (3)
The 9 Rights of Every Writer: A Guide for Teachers by Vicki Spandel on page 106, and Back Matter
Keywords in Creative Writing by David Starkey Wendy Bishop in Back Matter

See all 8 books citing this book

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4.2 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)

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79 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Sound of the Elements of Style, August 19, 2004

By	M. Garvey - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book has a very nice cover--really, a very cool design. I'm a little more equivocal about its insides. I was excited enough by the advance blurbs I read for this book to purchase it in hardcover a week or so after it was published--an extravagance that would shock those who know me well. But this topic appeals to me, and I like to throw a little support behind this sort of publishing enterprise once in a while.

The book is interesting enough, and Yagoda does a good job of keeping things moving with lots of examples of and chatter about style from practicing writers. My problem is with one of the book's enabling conventions: The idea that Strunk & White's The Elements Of Style presents an outmoded and "soul-deadening" idea of style and that only books such as Yagoda's truly plumb the subject to its core.

I've seen this sort of thing before, most notably in Clear and Simple as The Truth, by Thomas and Turner--a book weirdly bent on defying its own title and premise. The idea is to construct a straw man out of the immensely popular The Elements Of Style and then throw eggs at it. But it's an approach that anyone who knows Strunk & White well will recognize as a canard.

It's largely a made-up polemic, probably caused by the fact that writers are constantly being prodded to find and exploit "the angle" of the story. Magazines prod this way, so do agents and book publishers. It's not good enough to present a solid proposal for an article or book that simply discusses an interesting subject; there must be an angle, and the more controversial the better. And though it's hardly Watergate, smearing The Elements of Style is what passes for provocative in this crowd.

Yagoda states that Strunk & White's goal is prose that offers "...no trace of the author--no mannerisms, no voice, no individual style...." And then, in refutation of this fabricated Strunk & White "ideal," he fills his book with examples of writers who write with identifiable styles--ranging from subtle to sledgehammer. The examples are fun--these are really good writers--but he's wrong about The Elements of Style.

The first four fifths of The Elements of Style are largely about style in the sense of mechanics and word usage. No trouble there--that's not the kind of style we're talking about in the Yagoda book. In section five of The Elements, though--the section titled "An Approach to Style"--E. B. White takes a stab at offering beginning writers some simple, sound advice for clearing their prose of dross and deadwood so that they can begin the project of developing their own voice and personality on the page.

White's project, then, is to help a writer clear the decks so that the "self" can escape "into the open." Yagoda's mistake (and Harold Bloom's, on page xxi of Yagoda) is in thinking that White wants writers to stop once they've swept their prose free of clutter--to end with complete, bland transparency. But he doesn't; transparency, in White's view, is simply the necessary precondition for achieving one's individual voice as a writer--just as an empty canvas is the necessary precondition for painting a picture. "As he becomes proficient in the use of language," White says, "his style will emerge, because he himself will emerge." Does that sound like a recipe for "no mannerisms, no voice, no individual style"?

I am an editor who has worked with nonfiction writers for sixteen years. I press The Elements of Style on many of them--particularly those having trouble organizing their thoughts or getting their words out in a clear, compelling way--and it usually helps. It is only after mastering the fundamental tools of clear expression (the craft of bringing thought to page relatively intact) that a writer's personality, his "voice" or style, can begin to permeate his prose.

I have to believe it's been a long time since either Yagoda or Bloom spent an evening grading undergraduate essays (if indeed undergraduates are still required to write essays). The usefulness of The Elements of Style for such writers (if they study the book and apply its lessons) is incontrovertible.

Yagoda and Bloom, in fact, recognize the validity of White's approach, in spite of their trendy protestations. Bloom, page 159: "I have made the conscious effort to write in a more straightforward and accessible way." (Thank you, Harold.) Yagoda, page 236: "...the clearing of brush to create a walkable path, is never-ending for a writer." (That as near a restatement of White's thesis in "An Approach to Style" as you're likely to find.)

As for whether or not a writer can learn to write with "style" by reading this book, as Alex Beam's blurb on the back cover promises, the answer is no. A book such as this, while providing fun examples of style at work, is really no more or less instructive than the rest of a writer's (preferably wide) reading, from which he will sift and sort (consciously or not) the possibilities of voice, tone, and style in the ongoing effort to develop his own sound on the page.

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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Sound Book, June 24, 2004

By	Bruce E. Beans (Warrington, PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

With this engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking book, Ben Yagoda continues the discussion of what constitutes good writing that he initiated in "About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made." Well researched, considered and reasoned, the book opens with a fascinating cultural history of the concept of style. Arguments over whether it is best to write like Hemingway or Faulkner (or the middle-of-the-road Fitzgerald) date back, Yagoda notes, to the Greeks. In "On Rhetoric," for example, Aristotle emphasized clarity, transparency and decorum with an approach that presages some of the modern -- albeit, as Yagoda demonstrates, far from universally accepted -- message of Strunk & White's touchstone, "The Elements of Style." Yagoda then takes us on a journey across two hemispheres to discuss, with 40 different writers as diverse as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and best-selling humorist Bill Bryson, how they got their grooves. In short thematically arranged snippets and later, in extended monologues, they talk freely about: the writers who influenced them; how they arrived at their style, or styles; even the nuts-and-bolts question of how their writing implements (pen, typewriter, computer) and methods of revision affect the sound that we hear when we read their works. If you're like me, you'll find yourself endeavoring to read for the first time, or re-read, some of Yagoda's interview subjects and those they cite as seminal influences, such as the grand dame of essayists, Joan Didion.
For any reader or writer who gives a damn about the written word, this is a richly rewarding book.

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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In Defense of Style, May 14, 2006

By	M. JEFFREY MCMAHON "herculodge" (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: The Sound on the Page: Great Writers Talk about Style and Voice in Writing (Paperback)

Yagoda's thesis of this highly intelligent, generous book is that the dogma, championed by Strunk and White's Elements of Style, which shames us for having our own writing style, contradicts the joys and pleasures of writing, namely, that writers have their own individual finger-print style or voice. A writer's voice, his or her style, is the sensibility or personality giving life to the page. Yogada interviews several writers, including humorist David Barry, for the subject. Yagoda's own voice is smart and lively but never adademic. I should emphasize that the lack of academic-speak is one of the book's greatest virtues and triumphs. Here Yagoda has taken a book about the style of writing, a topic that could have easily been hijacked by some stuffy pretentious academic, but keeps the passion and accessibility on the level of a delicious pop book. Anyone interested in writing and style and literature in general should love this book.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars For a Special Audience
A lot of space on this page has been devoted to defending The Elements of Style Illustrated against Yagoda's abrupt dismissal. Fair enough. Read more

Published on October 18, 2007 by Lynn Hoffman, author:The Short...

1.0 out of 5 stars Willfully wrong-headed
The introduction ruined this for me. The author is so willfully wrong-headed, so determined to misunderstand Strunk & White's Elements of Style, and so arrogantly dismissive,... Read more

Published on August 31, 2007 by Compleat Reader

3.0 out of 5 stars A Disappointment
Yagoda was a big disappointment for me. I found the writing turgid and I never quite got the organization of the book. Read more

Published on May 21, 2007 by Gerald B. Keane

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book I have read about writing !
As a writer and teacher of writing for over thirty years, I have read hundreds (thousands?) of books, articles, and conference presentations on style and how to teach it. Read more

Published on May 15, 2007 by Anne M. Kuhta

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Best
This is a tremendous book, a must-read for anyone who wants to improve their writing skills. I've read many writing instruction books, from Zinsser's "On Writing Well" to Stein on... Read more

Published on April 8, 2007 by James H. Maguire

5.0 out of 5 stars thought provoking
Think you know what "style" is in writing? This book looks at every angle till you are humbled. Style is ... voice...rhythm..."the man"... Read more

Published on January 8, 2005 by Gregory Sever

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