4 Books That Will Improve Your Writing

Every college class has one thing in common, they all require writing. Often, your grade will depend equally on your writing skills as they will in the content of your writing. The two most important rules about writing are as follows:
1) Omit unnecessary words.
2) Use the appropriate word at the appropriate time.
Here are four books that will help you with those rules:

4) The Associated Press Stylebook

Ever wonder why most newspaper and magazine articles read similarly? As if every writer in America congregated yearly and decided on one style?
The answer is the AP Stylebook.

 

The Associated Press is a news-gathering organization that feeds stories to newspapers across America. It was funded in 1846 to help newspapers in New York City cover the war with Mexico. Since the entire purpose of the organization was delivering news quickly, it made sense to write in a minimalist style (rule #1). In other words, the reporters were writing as if each word (regardless of the number of letters) cost the same amount to telegraph to NYC. The style was then adopted by most publications.
Try this at home: read an article (online or print) and see how many words can be erased. Pretend someone is paying you a dollar per word. One catch, if the article does not make sense after editing, then no payment is given.
You can even try it on this blog.
Quick question: do you suffer injuries or do you receive injuries? Page 141 tell us that "injuries are suffered" and not sustained or received.
What's the difference between writing President Obama and Obama, the president? Page 225 says that "president" should only be capitalized when used as an official title.
Is it two-fold or twofold? Page 112 teaches that any word ending in "fold" does not have a hyphen.
The AP Stylebook reads like a dictionary for writing. Every word is punctuated and capitalized if it is stylistically correct to do so. And if you don't know whether to use fewer or less, farther or further, or lay or lie; the Stylebook can help. Both words and their usages are are written in the same page.

3) The Elements of Style

William Strunk Jr. and (later) E.B. White decided to write down the basic guidelines of writing the English language. They came up with five. Five guidelines that address almost every problem and confusion when it comes to writing.



One simple rule is behind them all, omit unnecessary words.
A whole chapter is dedicated to removing common non-contributing phrases such as:

The question as to whether
There is no doubt that
He is a man who

The book also teaches how to replace unnecessary and passive words with active ones.

"Hastily" instead of "in a hasty manner"
"Although" instead of "despite the fact that"
"The arrival" instead of "the fact that it arrived"

The fact that this book only has 105 pages is testament of the authors' commitment to minimalism.
Although my first rule is borrowed directly from this book, the other is also heavily influenced by it. An entire section is devoted to commonly missused words and phrases, but on a more basic level than the AP Stylebook.

Less or fewer? One refers to a quantity and the other to a number.
Leave it or let it? "Let" is an active verb as in "let go of the..."
Loan or Lend? Use "lend" as a verb and "loan" as a noun.

And that's only the "L" section. 

2) Writing for the Mass Media

I have kept this textbook since I was a sophomore because of a certain popular saying, "If you cannot explain it to a child, you do not understand it well enough."

  

James Glen Stovall understands writing and here he explains it to us. This book is nothing more than recipes: how to write a feature story, press release, radio spot or a newspaper advertisement. Stovall tells you the ingredients and the preparation.
Remember that time when that student asked a stupid question? The professor answered with disdain and moved on with the lecture. But a large number of students were relieved because they were too afraid to ask that question.
This textbook is full of those moments when Stovall answers a question that most were afraid to ask. What's a slug line? Which words are capitalized? How do you write the date?
Stovall treats us like children, with patience.

1) The Old Man and the Sea

Here is another famous saying: "If you can't write it in a paragraph, you can't write it."
Ernest Hemingway would spend an entire morning on a single paragraph of "The Old Man and the Sea". The novel won the Pulitzer Prize. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yes, it's that good.

  

Hemingway described his main character, Santiago, with one sentence:

He was an old man who fished alone in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

Everything you need to know about Santiago, his struggles, the stakes; it's all there. No unnecessary words, though.
Santiago hunts a giant Marlin off the coast off Cuba for days. The Marlin takes Santiago farther into the Gulf Stream as it struggles for survival. Hemingway tells the story in 127 pages; no chapters nor breaks in the novel.
Reading this novel may ruin other lesser books. The economy of language exemplifies the minimalist style. Hemingway reports on Santiago, as if he had interviewed him and researched the neccessary details at a later time.
Hemingway (like Vonnegut and Twain) was a journalist before becoming a novelist.
The reason I picked this novel (aside from it being one of my favorites) is to demonstrate that this style of writing is not exclusive to writing for newspapers. Writing an essay in a minimalist style with th AP Stylebook for reference will shave pages of your next report or essay. From experience, I can tell you that getting a point across is the most difficult part about essay-writing. Using the appropriate words and style will reduce the difficulty.