Content tagged with “writing” under

“Ridiculous book supposedly about the spread of the alphabet, but really about anything but that. This author hasn’t found a tangent he didn’t want to go off on. At any given point, I couldn’t figure out if the author was talking about the purported subject, or just telling some random story about a…”

“Loved this book. Just loved it. It’s a series of short essays on the often tortured art of writing. There are at almost 50 chapters, and in each, the author writes about some specific aspect of the struggle of writing, and how it’s a skill and discipline which develops over time. It turns out that…”

“I bought this book because I’ve come to understand that my career basically resolves around explaining things to people. So, I’m trying to develop that talent, and this book seemed like something short that I could read on a flight home. The only thing I took away from the first half is this: never…”

“You need to understand that this isn’t a book about the process of writing (as the title would suggest). This is really a meandering memoir of a particular writer’s life. I keep looking for some constructive instructional value, but it’s buried pretty deep. Mostly, McPhee just wants to tell…”

“This is a comprehensive book, to the point where you would kind of need to read it in a group, or make it a point to read it very slowly, synthesizing and integrating as you go. Just reading it from start to finish probably won’t accomplish much. This book is an examination of how human perceive a…”

“ TBA ”

“This is genre of science fiction that’s concerned with scientific accuracy, with explaining how something might actually work in the real world. For example, The Martian was hard science fiction. It presented an example of what an astronaut might actually do if stranded on Mars. A lot of Daniel…”

“This is a hard book to find. It’s out of print, I gather, so I could never find the Fourth Edition, but I did manage to somehow track down a PDF of the Third Edition, which had to suffice. It’s a solid, broad overview of the scholarly research process, from picking a topic, through doing the read,…”

“I have no idea why I bought this – I think I just wanted to know how writing about art would be different than anything else. And it was quite good. It very much becomes a general book about writing, especially later in the book, but the early sections have a lot of examples about art writing and…”

“This book is ambitious in trying to teach us all how to write an effective short form, but it’s hit or miss. It’s a firehose of information which sort of defies attempts to read it casually. There’s a lot there, and each chapter has exercises that you’re supposed to do – and I believe you do need…”

“ From the Latin ‘missivus’ which means ‘to be sent.’ It’s often defined as a physical letter, but increasingly is used for digital communications. ”

“One Sunday every month, I make the coffee at church, which means I spend a couple hours in the church kitchen. For years, I had looked right past this sign, but yesterday morning, for whatever reason, I suddenly realized what a masterpiece of technical documentation it is. It shows how to fold a…”

“I’ve started using AI quite a bit to interpret documents. I’ll have some document within which is some nugget of information I want, so I’ll upload it to ChatGPT and say, ‘Read this and tell me [the thing that I want]…’ These feels lazy, but it’s got me wondering if maybe this is a reflection on…”

“I enjoy business fiction, though so much of it is written badly. Below are some titles I’ve read (or am reading) that I enjoyed. The key for me is verisimilitude – it has to ‘feel’ right. We all know when a story feels contrived, and I’ve read more than a few of those too. But all four of these…”

“This post linked below goes a lot of different directions, but I love this point – …the printing revolution partially caused the scientific revolution by making knowledge more rigid. Before, if some observation didn’t match some claim, you could always shrug and be like: ‘Well, the person who…”

“One of the greatest books every written on writing. Zinsser strikes the perfect balance between a strategic and tactical approach to what writers do. He mixes good perspective with practical advice. The first part is all plans and strategy. He’s big on clarity – every word should serve a purpose….”

“I enjoyed the book, but maybe it should mention that it’s fundamentally about fiction. I was hoping for something about storytelling in a business context, but this is about novels and films and such. In fact, there’s a long appendix will explores the structure of a novel that the author took from…”

“ This refers to a professional scribe or copyist, whose job it was to copy manuscripts before the printing press was invented. The etymology traces back to the Latin word for ‘scribe.’ ”

“This is a book that describes the U.S. intelligence community so that spy novel writers can describe it more accurately. Note the subtitle: How to Write Spy Novels, TV Shows and Movies Accurately and Not Be Laughed at by Real-Life Spies The book delivers on what it says – it’s a very stark…”

“This is one of those motivational/inspirational type books. It doesn’t really present a lot of new information, and it’s formatted all funky with weird fonts and colors and stuff (a la Tom Peters), and it’s really short – you can read it in 30 minutes. The goal is to impress upon you that it’s okay…”

“ Interesting, full of pictures, but it got ponderous. Weirdly long, because it’s basically a picture book, but with a lot of text, so you spend a lot of time starting and ending sections, and looking at captions. You don’t really get in a narrative flow. Almost a coffee table book, really. ”

“This was just okay. The author presents nine points to make you give better TED-like presentations. It’s padded – some of the lessons are obvious, and the author gets really repetitive trying to stretch them out for an entire chapter. Additionally, she keeps going over the same TED talks again and…”

“Margot really hits on the thing we all sort of know about content but don’t acknowledge: some content, we just don’t trust, and some content we do. We probably don’t even acknowledge that at any conscious level, but when we talk about ‘good content’ we’re talking content that we trust. I almost…”

“I bought this because I want to get better at explaining things. It was…okay? What’s sad, is that finished it a couple weeks ago, and I honestly can’t remember anything about it worth writing. I do remember it being quite basic. It has a lot of examples as well, which I was nice. But, seriously,…”

“Robert Caro writes a very particular type of book. He hasn’t written that many, but they were (and are) huge and detailed. He wrote a book called The Power Broker which was a 1,200 biography of the NYC city planner Robert Moses. Caro won a Pulitzer for that. He won another Pulitzer for one of the…”

“I abandoned this at about the halfway point, for two reasons: I probably wasn’t the right audience. It’s geared toward more novice writers. It’s fundamentally a book of exercises (the title was pretty clear about this; I should have paid more attention). Each chapter is a writing prompt that you’re…”

“Unfortunately, I didn’t like this book, and it pains me to write this, since I had just finished ‘On Writing Well’ for the third time, and it’s amazing. But this book…it just didn’t do anything for me. Zinsser presents this as an examination of writing non-fiction, and how this type of writing can…”