This book is for the absolute beginner in writing. If you've already had instruction on the subject this book won't advance your skills. Very well laid out however and easy to read & follow. Exercises are great and assist in developing new skills. ( )

There's two things you should know before reading this review:
1) I didn't finish this book. I didn't even get halfway. Very quickly I realized that in addition to being badly written, it wasn't meant for me in the first place.

2)This book wasn't meant for me. I want to write fiction. I've already had quite a lot of practice and read quite a few books about the subject. This is a book obviously meant to help college students write papers. So why do I even have this? Well, about three years ago I went and bought several books that were recurrent on lists like, "Books Every Writer Needs to Read." This book was one of them, and I just now got around to looking at it.

I can't criticize the book for not being what I expected, but it's worthy of criticism all on it's own. Maybe I'm just out of touch with the "average Joe" but I felt like I was being talked down to the entire time I was reading this.

How could you not feel like the book is mocking your intelligence with chapter sub-headings like How to Find a Book, Where do Ideas Come From?, and How to Read a Book. I feel as though you would have to be so stupid to let that stuff slide that this book's very commonplace advice wouldn't even help you, so why should anybody buy it?

And it gets worse. Almost every page is stuffed full of banal analogies that really don't serve to get the message across any better than plain language. Also they bloat the text quite a bit. Stuff like planning a weekend trip and hitching a train. Completely, utterly unnecessary; and BORING. Very, very boring. No thank you.

Another thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was the book's entire disregard for discovery writers. Yes, writing a college paper and writing a novel are two different things, but you know what? There are still people who discovery write great college papers and this book can go and shove it's OCD stricture. When I had a college paper I did not sit and plan everything out, make sure my ideas were in a list, and that the list was 'in order', before writing it, as this book says must be done, and I did fine. This book clings to order like it's going out of style--which it is.




( )

Excellent book on developing one's writing skills. I can already write a clear, more organized essay after working through the exercises in the first couple chapters of this book. The chapters are logical, readable, and make sense. Highly recommended for most young writers.