How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them by Ben Yagoda, and: Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts into Finished Work by Steven M. Cahn & Victor L. Cahn (review)

William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's Elements of Style is a work that seems either to delight or to antagonize folks who write about writing. Stanley Fish is one critic of the brief work; Geoffrey Pullum is another, declaiming its 'limp platitudes' and 'inconsistent nonsense.'¹ But Ben Yagoda, Steven Cahn, and Victor Cahn, whose recent contributions to the literature on writing I review here, are card-carrying members of the Strunk and White cause. Their orientation manifests itself most materially, perhaps, in the brevity of their contributions: When you vigilantly 'omit needless words,' as Strunk and White famously (or infamously) instruct, you're left with focused, pointed, streamlined prose — and a message that should be both concise and clear.²

Ben Yagoda, professor of journalism and English at the University of Delaware, whose other books on writing include The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing (New York: HarperCollins 2004) and When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech for Better and/or Worse (New York: Broadway 2006), includes a clear message in the first part of his How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them. His foundational advice, for readers aspiring 'to not write bad,' or for 'everyone who wants to improve his or her prose' (3), is to read—and to read mindfully, attentively. Wonderful advice it is. Yagoda qualifies that what must be read is writing that has gone through 'the old-fashioned pipeline': prose that has been 'selected and processed by an editor' before being published (17).³ Most online writing, then, doesn't count. Careful reading, the benefits of which can be amplified by reading aloud, allows one, over time, to develop an eye for syntactical, structural, and rhetorical detail and an ear for rhythm, cadence, and pacing.⁴ Mindfulness and attentiveness carry over to the writing act itself, during which one should not multitask: 'Merely listening to music while trying to write constitutes multitasking, not to mention texting, watching TV, scanning a computer, and so forth' (23-4).

Estimating that fifty errors account for 95 per cent of the problems in most writing, Yagoda devotes the bulk of his book to an identification of these common errors and an explanation of ways to avoid them.⁵ He offers examples from college-student writing and frequently provides his own revisions, In the second part, Yagoda discusses the importance of consistency or 'house style,' describes common errors with punctuation marks, presents commonly misused homophones and eggcorns, and offers a taxonomy of grammatical 'mistakes' spanning those that have been 'sanitized' (once verboten but now becoming accepted) to those that are 'still wrong.'⁶ In being comfortable with the fact that 'standards evolve over time' (9), Yagoda agrees with lexicographer Robert Burch-field, who wrote over two decades ago that 'All languages are subject to perpetual change and English is no exception.'⁷ For example, Yagoda believes one may now, without flinching, judiciously split infinitives, end sentences with prepositions, and use objective pronouns in comparisons, (I disagree with the last, which allows constructions such as 'They have a bigger house than us.') I applaud, however, his resistance of the use of they and their as epicene (that is, gender-neutral) pronouns in reference to singular antecedents. But, acknowledging...