A slim but effective manual for writing in the workplace.
Ancowitz helps readers craft concise missives in this writing guide.
Nowhere is the economy of language more valuable than in business writing. Attention spans have never been shorter, and sentences need to shrink if writers don’t want them to get skipped over by busy, distracted readers. In a world of jargon and wasted words, the author recommends crisp, accessible writing. “Why write ‘utilize’ when ‘use’ conveys the same meaning, yet doesn’t sound forced?” she asks in her introduction. “How about wordy pronouncements of false modesty, like: ‘in my humble opinion’? No. How about the snooze-inducing: ‘It seems to me…?’ Nooo! Or the self-important: ‘I’m writing to personally invite you…’ Never!” With this guide, Ancowitz offers a speed course in sleek composition, covering everything from the principles of clarity and concision to creating attention-grabbing headlines and gripping opening sentences. Each short chapter presents a topic and offers examples of what to do (and what not to do), accompanied by even briefer chapter-ending roundups of “rookie mistakes,” “pro tips,” and “big ideas.” She also includes space for readers to practice each lesson. The author’s advice is practical and, appropriately, communicated with precision. Here, she discusses lead sentences: “Set a stopwatch to 5 seconds (about the time it takes to skim up to this point in this paragraph). If you don’t get to your point before the beeper goes off, most of your readers will have moved on to the next email, text, or other input vying for their attention.” Some of Ancowitz’s takes may be slightly controversial (she’s a fan of ChatGPT), and the practice prompts tend to be not entirely helpful (in part because the answers are visible directly beneath them). For writers whose primary goal it is to compose a sharp email, however, this is a sound primer—and all in just 100 pages.
A slim but effective manual for writing in the workplace.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9798991368438
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Livestream Universe
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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