A wide-ranging and comprehensive guide filled with practical advice that will be most helpful for beginning writers.
A manual for beginning writers to start transferring their spoken ideas onto the page.
“The key to becoming a good writer,” Klein writes in his introduction, is “Getting your speaking voice out of your head and putting it down on paper.” After running a freelance-writing business and publishing several Sudoku instruction books, he decided to group his best pieces of technical writing advice in this manual. Music and speech are at the core of his arguments about what makes great writing; he cites scientific studies about how crying babies mimic the musicality of spoken language and cites other writers, such as Gary Provost, who stress the importance of re-creating cadences on the page. Klein distills a lot of basics that more experienced writers will remember from Strunk & White’s concise handbook: choosing active voice over passive, varying sentence structures, and choosing unexpected or unusual words. However, Klein does try to keep his examples fun and engaging, such as by comparing Stevie Wonder’s repetitive “I Just Called to Say I Love You” lyrics to those of the Young Rascals’ “How Can I Be Sure?” His most interesting advice comes when he explores the distinction between free-writing and flow-writing; he encourages writers to attack a subject they know with a general plan in mind, without fixing one’s grammar or other mistakes at first. Klein’s book is primarily a textbook for beginners; as such, he delves into technical matters such as time management, self-publishing, and getting the most of word-processing programs. He also synthesizes advice from numerous other authors and includes an extensive quotes and references section, all of which will be helpful to those just starting out. However, the book might be too expansive for those who are simply looking to polish their skills, and Klein includes very little about his own personal stories and processes.
A wide-ranging and comprehensive guide filled with practical advice that will be most helpful for beginning writers.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5485-6846-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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