From Harold Evans’s Do I Make Myself Clear? A Practical Guide to Writing Well in the Modern Age (2017):
The tsunami of new words has not so far relieved us of the encroaching corruptions of political vocabulary skewered by Orwell seventy years ago.Seventy years skewered but still encroaching. And the tsunami can’t help. Help.
Countless books on writing offer less egomania, greater clarity, greater concision, better organization, and fewer mixed metaphors. In other words, better writing. I have only 233 pages of Sir Harold’s book to go.
Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)
How to improve writing (no. 78)
[How did this book pass the page-ninety test? Good question. Page ninety offers a succinct statement — “The passive voice is preferable if not inescapable in four categories” — followed by examples. The page is atypical.]
comments: 3
Who is this guy, and why should we care what he thinks about writing? (I suppose I should go look that up for myself.)
Former editor of The Times and The Sunday Times, writer of best-selling history books, former president and publisher of Random House. Whatever his achievements, this book is hardly a “definitive guide to writing well,” despite what the back cover claims.
Whew.
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