A common-sense refresher course on clear, informative writing.
Practical advice to help achieve civic clarity in writing.
Poynter Institute senior scholar Clark returns with another warm and witty book on writing in these dark days of misinformation and propaganda. Organizing the book into three sections, the author’s goal is “to offer a succinct and practical guide to writing with clarity, honesty, and conviction,” and he focuses on what he calls the bright light of “public” writings by journalists, scientists, economists, storytellers, and poets. Clark begins with an example of good public writing: the instructions for an at-home Covid-19 test. The directions featured short paragraphs, simple words, lots of white space, and clear typography, delivering an effective message. The author ends each breezy chapter with a “Highlights” section of examples and suggestions—e.g., “Read your sentence aloud to see if you can follow it.” Short is always good when explaining complex issues. Avoid jargon, and use as few numbers as possible. Clear charts and graphs can be helpful. Write with the reader’s interest in mind. Let first drafts “cool off for a while.” An apt analogy is a “powerful but underutilized tool in the writer’s workbench.” In the second section, Clark turns his attention to telling good stories in the public interest. He explores the differences between reports and stories and the importance of writing in service of public ritual and working on making important information interesting. The last section focuses on honesty and candor in public writing and how writers can “develop a sense of mission and purpose.” Clark also reminds us that readers benefit from both showing and telling. He discusses the need for neutrality in public writing and the poison of propaganda as well as the best way to debunk information without calling more attention to it. He explains why he likes the semicolon and “one of the most useful and underappreciated words in the English language: that.”
A common-sense refresher course on clear, informative writing.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780316317139
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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