4 ms·
I was an editor before getting into tech, and these are the books that still hold up 20 years later: Readable and fun, but extremely useful: • Lapsing into a
by joegahona 4y ago
I was an editor before getting into tech, and these are the books that still hold up 20 years later:
Readable and fun, but extremely useful:
• Lapsing into a Comma, Bill Walsh (RIP)
• The 10% Solution, Ken Rand (for editing down wordy text)
• Sin and Syntax, Constance Hale
• Woe Is I, Patricia T. O'Conner
More resource-like and grammar-heavy:
• Words Into Type, Marjorie E. Skillin (hard-core grammar rules, great section on redundancies)
• Chicago Manual of Style (in general, the core style of book and magazine writing)
• Associated Press Stylebook (in general, the core style of newspaper writing)
• Garner's Modern English Usage, Bryan A. Garner
• Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
• Dictionary of American Idioms, Maxine Tull Makkai
Not about writing, but hilarious and snobby and awesome -- great airplane reading:
• The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, Charles Harrington Elster
- wellthisisgreat 4y agoThank you! Any books you’d recommend specifically for non-technical (narrative) writing?
- joegahona 4y agoYou are welcome! None of the books I listed are for technical writing. I'm not completely sure if by "narrative" you mean fiction...? But these are decidedly not fiction/creative-writing resources. What type of writing are you looking to optimize?
- wellthisisgreat 4y agothank you! I meant fiction, yes. Optimizing the "flow" of fiction, especially around some stylistic norms that are not neccessarily intuitive - for example not using words more complex than "said / replied / answered" in dialogues ("Wow," he said VS "Wow," he noted) as that makes understanding dialogue harder to process. Or the rules around using / not using passive voice, also when is it better to use the synonyms VS the most common word.