A comprehensive, stimulating guide to getting the word out.
A revealing primer on the art of effective emails and other communications.
Babicki, in his debut self-help guide, covers the many peculiarities of computerized messaging: How to shape an eye-catching subject line; how to troubleshoot error messages from a returned email; what the file-extension suffixes on attachments mean; what the email time stamp tells others about your personality (night owl vs. early riser); and how to craft a corporate email security policy. His advice on these sometimes-arcane topics is precise—“RTF format should only be used when it is certain that the recipient uses Outlook”—while also remaining intelligible to laypeople. The author also instructs readers on time-honored principles of proper English and clear expression. He delves with detailed lucidity into rules of grammar, punctuation and usage; prescribes the proper formatting of numbers and dates; and inveighs against the dangling participle. He also explores the tonal shadings of different kinds of salutations, crusades for concise and gracious style, warns against the gassy redundancy of such wordings as “final outcome” and “at an early time,” and appends a blacklist of “the most irritating phrases,” from “out of the box” to “team player.” Good writing grows from good thinking, so he instructs readers on the pitfalls of logical fallacies, from the ad hominem attack to the begged question, and on the distinctions between assumption, presumption and inference. Furthermore, since communication is the cornerstone of civilized life, he limns its legal and moral underpinnings in copyright and plagiarism strictures, codes of courteous Internet deportment and techniques for pacifying flame wars. (He recommends a “Zen” approach, for example, in replying to angry missives.) The result is a mashup of Strunk and White, Miss Manners, Aristotle and Microsoft Help, all laid out in a well-organized, very readable text sprinkled with amusing examples and phrased in the tart, aphoristic style of an exacting schoolmaster (“The better it sounds, the more it is trusted”). Overall, Babicki’s technical expertise and literary aplomb make this a fine manual for the everyday scribe.
A comprehensive, stimulating guide to getting the word out.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481849524
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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