![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI can’t remember where I picked up my copy of Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools, but I have been hearing good things about it from my fellow editors for several years. I think I got it off another editor, but regrettably I can’t remember who.
Anyway, Writing Tools lives up to the hype. It would be worth the price of the whole book just for the bits on the ladder of abstraction, which gives a nice concise framework to a particular type of dull writing I run into all the time, thus allowing easier pinpointing of what is wrong with it. (How to fix it still may often require more time than I’m given, but whatever.) Some of the tools are on the “nuts and bolts” of writing–word choice and sentence structure and all–and others are more about organization and process. There are exercise questions for the reader to practice applying these tools, which I did not do but which seemed like very useful homework assignments, and possibly I should go do them at some point. Overall a very solid little book; a classic for a reason.
Anyway, Writing Tools lives up to the hype. It would be worth the price of the whole book just for the bits on the ladder of abstraction, which gives a nice concise framework to a particular type of dull writing I run into all the time, thus allowing easier pinpointing of what is wrong with it. (How to fix it still may often require more time than I’m given, but whatever.) Some of the tools are on the “nuts and bolts” of writing–word choice and sentence structure and all–and others are more about organization and process. There are exercise questions for the reader to practice applying these tools, which I did not do but which seemed like very useful homework assignments, and possibly I should go do them at some point. Overall a very solid little book; a classic for a reason.