The New Rambler Review has posted my long-form review of Harold Evans's book Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters. As many readers know, Evans in a near-legendary author and editor, having led both the Sunday Times in the U.K. and Random House in the U.S. He was knighted in 2004 for his contributions to British journalism, and he is currently an editor-at-large for Reuters. And he has also written two best-sellers. Nonetheless, I found this book lacking. Evans's advice about writing is well-worn and familiar, and he greatly exaggerates to impact of poor writing in the real world. Here are a couple of teasers from my review:
The title of Harold Evans’s new book asks a question, but it is not the right one. The book is Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters, and its promotional material promises to offer “timeless tools for making meaning clear.” Evans’s bibliography lists over fifty writing guides, plus many more usage and grammar books, all of which prompt a more meaningful inquiry. With so much advice already available – from luminaries such as George Orwell, William F. Buckley, Bryan Garner, Robert Graves, Jacques Barzun, Stephen King, William Safire, Helen Sword, and William Zinsser – do we really need another book on style and composition? Granting Evans’s near legendary status as both an author and an editor, does he actually have anything new and helpful to say? Alas, he does not.
And
There is an undeniable relationship between bad writing and bad politics, as George Orwell first observed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Evans’s final section on “Consequences” takes Orwell’s generalization much further, arguing that poor writing leads to direct harm in the real world. Here he takes aim at soft targets, pointing out the turgid bafflements of legal, bureaucratic, and corporate writing. But is it really the case, as Evans posits, that better drafting could actually make a measurable difference in peoples’ lives? His examples do not bear him out.
You can read the entire review here.