Reading Books on Writing, Part One
Dear Reader,
Today’s piece is distinct from my series of essays on “Reading as a Writer” (Parts One and Two so far). I suppose one often reads books on writing as a writer, but I’m making a fine-tuned difference for ease of discussion.
Please do not think that my categories are hard-set or definitive. While not arbitrary, they exist simply for the ease of our initial consideration and can be dispensed with once that task is handled.
So here’s the distinction I’m operating under: “Reading as a Writer” involves imitating what professional writers do when they ‘read for stitching’ in other writers’ works. That is, reading as a writer means we analyze what we’re reading as a professional writer might, asking ourselves questions like “What makes this third paragraph tick?”
“Reading Books on Writing” involves reading reference manuals on the writing craft.
Here I’m including three types of manuals: punctuation and style guides, genre and big-picture advice, and celebrity author writing-craft books. I’m excluding most other books on the writing life—no authorpreneurs and other such frights need our deep consideration—and guides like Writer’s Market.
I generally find authors ruminating on their writing craft to be as inspiring and insightful as David Foster Wallace found Tracy Austen’s autobiography. (I do greatly appreciate author memoirs, which I submit are not the same thing as their crafted masterclasses on the written word, works that would invite a person to question their skill were it not for the other writing that gave them their reputations.) This is my way of saying that I probably won’t write much on these books because I can’t do them justice. I don’t like them the way other people do, and so I’ll spare all of us my churlishness.
But the other two types of manuals I can say something about. Certainly not everything—I think other writers have clearly benefited more from the advice of such manuals—but enough to get us started. As not a few of my readers are writers more expert than I, please do share your responses, not least as I don’t intend today’s piece as a solo one.
I’ll stick to the punctuation and style guides for today, because those are the ones I’ve been reading recently for an assortment of purposes. For “pure” punctuation guides, my recent list includes The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier and classic The Elements of Style. For one that straddles the line between punctuation and style guide, I have Bryan A. Garner’s Better Business Writing. And for style guides, I have readily in mind They Say, I Say; How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One; and Farnsworth’s Classical English Style.
The first thing about punctuation and style guides is to realize that they are inherently defeasible in their advice. That is, they are subject to a variety of exceptions and contextual considerations that make their guidance truisms rather than definitive matters established in holy writ.
(This, of course, upsets people who imagine themselves Grammar Nazis, the Grammar Police, and other such lovely titles, but I’m not especially interested in the cloddish thinking of that illustrious clan of mediocre meritocrats. I’m glad you had an eighth-grade teacher with strong feelings about grammar. So did I. Much was learned; much was forgotten. Most important, much was never known by that teacher.)
If you spend enough time with grammar books, you learn that even the parts of speech have varied dramatically from grammar guide to grammar guide over the years. (No, this is not a fun thing to discover.) You also learn that punctuation and style guides are great anchors for specific publications, specific martinets, and specific occasions.
The last of that list is probably the most important for most people. If you don’t wish to think through precisely how you’d like your sentence to work, especially in connection with other sentences, a rough-and-ready guide is great. I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s true. For mature writers a grammar guide can act as a reference for an unusual scenario; for occasional writers a grammar guide is a more frequent aid. And other such writing guides are approached similarly.
Pure punctuation-and-grammar guides are best handled as follows: read your chosen guide through from cover to cover. And once you know where stuff is, use it thereafter only as a reference in need. (Some will need to reference more frequently than others. Some of us should reference more frequently than we do.)
For punctuation and style guides: if it’s short, read from cover to cover, and then reference a little more frequently if it’s a good guide. It’s a reminder read. If it’s a longer work—here I’m thinking of something like Bryan A. Garner’s magisterial Garner’s Modern English Usage—you’d be better served treating it as a reference for specific questions unless you are a gigantic language nerd. And even then…
For style guides, well, let’s talk about those a bit more.
There are at least two levels of style guides: the rudimentary forms that provide framework and inspiration for any aspiring writer, and the intermediate guides that most benefit those writers who’ve spent excessive time with novice guides and desire a bridge to something meatier.
They Say, I Say is certainly an example of a rudimentary style guide; William Zinsser’s On Writing Well is probably the standard of the genre. This is not an insult. Foundational works are necessary and good ones are a delight to share with novice and even maturing writers.
Maybe others have noted that there’s an intermediate position among writing guides between the foundational and professional, but I’ve not personally bumped into it. If it isn’t written about much—and, again, I might have overlooked such writing—it’s likely because the intermediate guides are often themselves advertised as being either rudimentary or just for language nerds, whatever that latter category clarifies for aspiring writers.
As you may recall from my exploration of How to Write a Sentence, that book advertises itself as an adequate replacement for The Elements of Style, itself a rudimentary guide. Aside from How to Write a Sentence being about a completely different end of the writing process (which its author at least acknowledges), the book is not even remotely a rudimentary guide: it instead offers a solid intermediate step in writing. The writing advice is beyond the endurance of a casual or burgeoning writer. (Not beyond their comprehension exactly, but certain to frustrate their appreciation.) As a second step or intermediate style guide, How to Write a Sentence is much better positioned to find a readership that can benefit from its intended goals.
A recent entry among the intermediate style guides is Farnsworth’s Classical English Style, published in 2020. While I’ve no immediate interest in that author’s other guides—they are the stuff of nerds who enjoy playing rhetoric bingo during presidential debates, and I am not this person for reasons of soundness of mind—this oddity kept bubbling up as being either language-saving claptrap or useful intermediate reference. The former category not in its favor. But this absolutely zany and perhaps dissuading-to-most commendation of that book forced me to pick up a copy. And what I found was a book that mostly approaches the same territory as How to Write a Sentence with the added benefits of better self-awareness of purpose and better organization.
To purpose, observe this excerpt from its preface:
A large share of books about prose style are about how to avoid mistakes. They explain why bad writing sounds that way. This book is about stylistic virtue. It asks why good writing sounds that way.
Books on style usually emphasize some general principles. This book also has general principles to offer, but it spends a great deal of attention on details. Some readers will find those details to be too much, but there is no avoiding minutiae if you want to understand why some kinds of writing sound better than others. A style is the result of many small decisions about words, order, tone, cadence, and so on. If you don’t have the patience to look hard at little choices like those, that’s perfectly reasonable and perhaps a sign of good health. This book is for those who do have the patience because they want to know what has made some heroic writers sound the way they do.
I don’t know how you can more clearly note that you’re writing an intermediate guide. It’s perfectly lovely.
(For the record, there are places where How to Write a Sentence outshines Farnsworth’s Classical English Style, as Stanley Fish has a few sections and insights that are simply excellent and worthy of reflection or classroom discussion. Farnsworth has better understood his overall task, or at least written better for the task he claims for himself, which is what we would most desire from a writing guide of any purpose.)
I must admit that I’ve not encountered too many intermediate books. Among punctuation manuals and the like, there are unnumberable novice guides, most of them nondescript. The intermediate level, the “here’s step two in your writing journey,” seems a category you’re more likely to luck upon than to have any idea that it exists.
(There are a few in the punctuation/grammar realm, but aside from the fact that I’m not personally inclined to purchase most of them because I already have advanced ones that I trust, too many of them turn into pop linguistics or neuroscience books, at which point I’d rather read the real stuff from those fields.)
Do you have a favorite intermediate guide? Did I discuss punctuation-and-grammar guides too briefly for your tastes? Were you expecting a different David Foster Wallace reference? (I was.)
Perhaps of most importance, were you ever introduced to the idea of intermediate or next-step guides, or were you, too, expected to just “catch on” from the context of your reading and graded papers? Or maybe you dislike the idea of intermediate guides altogether. Have I added an unnecessary category for us to consider?
To be continued,
Kreigh
P.S. There’s a thing I’ve been thinking about for a while, and that’s because it relates to the reading life and the things I’d like to read and what sort of reading I should support. But I recently saw someone who noted that if they actually looked into their budget for all the newsletters they subscribe to, the total spent in a year would be $300.
The response of almost everyone was that this amount was absurd and that the way out was to subscribe to magazines, wherein one could get the diversity of writers but at a much lower cost. (Feel free to substitute newspaper for magazine if you so desire.)
I’m going to make an economic claim or a value claim, however you’d like to view it, so please consider the following in that vein. I don’t, in fact, think that $300 a year is a lot to spend on reading material. As publisher Anne Trubek has observed, books today are vastly underpriced when considered alongside inflation. Yes, I’m aware that publishing costs have dropped in many ways, but while I understand how CDs haven’t increased in price in 2+ decades, because the real economic driver for music has rightly been shifted to live performances, the real economic driver for books is, well, books. I don’t want a bunch of authorpreneurs running around. I don’t want more windbags winding me up with their conferences and revivalist gatherings. I want good writing by people who have the time and focus to write good things.
Now, books aren’t magazines or newspapers. I trust you figured I could make the distinction. And I have zero desire to pay more for present-day newspapers, with a few caveats in place on that one (I do have a piece on that forthcoming, I think, so I’ll save those thoughts for then). But the economic problem that Anne Trubek noted about books readily applies to magazines and newspapers. I note this because the easy answer that so many people make about the problem that newsletters “think they are solving” is that everyone should just subscribe to magazines and that we are just replicating magazines but inefficiently.
I like that word, “inefficiently.” It’s a word most of these magazine editors would decry when it comes to their work, but somehow it (or the idea of it) becomes a bugaboo if the cashflow isn’t going to their magazines but instead directly to writers. I have all sorts of issues with a cavalcade of independent writers, but efficiency isn’t among them. (Efficiency of reading would be, but not whether several individual writers are an inefficient version of a magazine. That’s just dumb.)
Here’s why I’m not convinced, present day, that magazines solve the problem that newsletters are trying to address: I’ve been offered $400 for pieces of writing that took me two months of research and another two weeks to write. To contrast that, I’ve made $400 for one hour of tutoring. Another essay that, aside from pulling from over a decade of my research, would take me a solid work week to make adequate would gain me a grand total of $50. I might still write that piece, as I respect the publication, but that’s a public service at that point. And this is the kicker—for doing work that’s below a sustainable wage, writers have to bend their writing to the service of individual publications instead of bending their writing the way they best see fit.
That’s a keen distinction.
Yes, magazines and newspapers ostensibly offer editing (depends on the outlet). And this I think a good thing. But present-day magazines and papers (and book publishers) don’t offer enough for any writer to make it unless that writer is absurdly prolific or famous. So, no, I don’t think that the bundling of a newspaper or magazine remedies the problem of how writers get paid.
Put another way, the magazine—and maybe newspaper—world supports a specific set of writers. And that’s all right.
For myself, I’d rather write this newsletter for free—even with the occasional things that irk me after I hit send—than take meager pay and the annoyance of extensive editing for someone else’s publication. I love editing when it’s in the service of a better piece. Like, I have a weird appreciation for a great editing experience. When it’s in the service of a specific publication’s constraints and the amount of time editing to those constraints is beyond what it would take to make a good piece in general, I must admit that I’m just not inclined to do that extra work for a pittance. I’d rather be honest that I’m working for free at that point, and simply write for free, as I have with this newsletter.
And this brings me back to the $300, newsletters, and magazines. I don’t actually pay a dime for any newsletters. And I don’t support anyone on Patreon, though I used to until Existential Comics did not live up to the terms of agreement for support. I do, however, spend around $100 a year on magazine and journal subscriptions. That is, I support the very places one is supposed to support. So my observation here isn’t from the standpoint of a newsletter junkie who’s offended that his favorite newfangled diversion has been attacked.
To Anne Trubek’s comment, I’m in agreement, now that I’ve had time to consider it. I’d rather a Folio Society edition of Around the World in Eighty Days than some mass market copy for two bucks. I’d rather save the two bucks for coffee and get a free public library copy of the book. I’m willing to pay “extra” for a better-looking book or one from a contemporary author where said author gets the larger chunk of that price increase. (I’m not advocating for the hundred-dollar books in argumentation theory where the bulk of the money goes to some rapacious academic publisher that couldn’t even be bothered to copyedit.) Good things, quality things, sometimes require a little more pocket money. And so when people are like “$300, THE HORROR!” I’m wondering what their concern is. To my mind, they are running the wrong math.
I don’t subscribe to Stratechery anymore (the godfather of Substack et al.) not because of the financial cost but because of the time cost. I still get the once-a-week free piece, but I couldn’t justify reading Ben Thompson four times a week. Too many pieces were duds. And my connection to the tech and investment worlds isn’t as tight as it used to be. I would, in fact, pay for the once-a-week only option. That is, I don’t want more middling reading, that’s the cost I can’t handle.
I don’t subscribe to newsletters because I don’t want to read more writing from most of these writers. I already have too much to read with magazine subscriptions and books. (I don’t subscribe to a few other newsletters because if you’re a tenured prof who already gets published in paid venues like magazines and books in addition to your steady-for-now day job, stop soaking up part of that $300 from writers who don’t have a tenured gig. This is admittedly tricky ethical territory, but from my vantage point, a well-published tenured prof’s newsletter should be for the public good. Others see differently from me and fair enough.) There’s a limit to how much someone can read, and the more newsletters that pop into my inbox, the less happy I am. This has been and remains my worry with this newsletter. It’s why, while I initially published five days a week at the beginning of the pandemic shutdown in America, once other publications started releasing more material, I slowed my own publishing pace. People had other options, and they no longer needed my ruminations to fill the entertainment void. And so I decreased my writing speed (also because ye gods that was a lot of writing).
I’m not on the free email lists for Athwart and Los Angeles Review of Books because I want to force myself to go to their websites when I’m desirous of reading them. If it doesn’t come to mind for two months, great! And when it does, I can peruse as I see fit. I subscribe to only two free newsletters, ones that gurgle happily into my world and don’t demand anything other than my calm reflection whenever I see fit to greet them.
The math that should be in play, then, is the volume of material that must be coming your way if you’re spending $300 a year on subscriptions. Stratechery alone comes to $100 with four essays a week, of varying length and editing quality (I use Thompson’s newsletter as fodder for teaching Garner’s Better Business Writing). If you do only two more such newsletters, of the same publishing speed, that’s twelve essays a week that you’ve paid for. And those essays usually link to other essays…
Now, I can easily read twelve essays most weeks. Yet do I desire twelve essays from only three writers? Heck, do I desire twelve essays from only six writers? That’s a lot of time with a small number of thinkers. I’d probably rather that than a subscription to certain magazines, but a magazine I can at least hide. The newsletters come to harass me in my inbox. Twelve essays a week that are already paid for, and thus in a certain way demanded of me. (I’m aware of the sunk-cost fallacy, thanks)
My stance on the $300 a week, then, isn’t about how much it’s costing a year. Most people spend that on some entertainment or another. And it isn’t about magazines being a better option because (1) they aren’t necessarily a better financial option for the writers I’m trying to support and (2) they might not allow the writers I’m trying to support to write the diversity of things I’d like them to be writing. My question about the $300 is about how many obligations I now have for reading. What have I committed myself to financially that now demands my time?
I don’t know that newsletters solve the problem of patronage. I think they don’t. And I know that good editors can make decent writers great. (I’ve seen my own tepid prose turned into something almost tolerable on the rare occasion I could afford a good editor.) Maybe with enough subscribers, a newsletter author could employ a good editor (Thompson has an assistant for Stratechery, but he truly needs an editor). But for myself, I’d pay that $300 gladly if it would support writers who produced fewer newsletter essays. My primary annoyance with the newsletter phenomenon isn’t the funding, or the challenge to newspapers and magazines, or that cranks are getting more air. It’s simply the sheer glut of material.
I’m probably alone in this, but I would joy seeing some writers with the security to publish the occasional piece instead of the necessity to publish and publish and publish some more. Maybe I’m wrong in thinking that there would be better writing for it. Maybe I’m odd in thinking that a once-a-month, tight, 400-word piece is more desirable than newsletter after newsletter of space-filling drivel, the capaciousness of Dickens and Dumas fitted into the garments of lifehackers.
While maybe a few of our hack writers will reach those novelists’ heights, count me among those who’d like to reward writers of fewer thoughts, but ones better crafted or longer considered.