Inspection Book

This is my favorite book on writing. It's not for beginners; Tufte won't waste your time explaining the parts of speech. There are a great many books out there that do this already. Instead, Tufte is an expert on how careful usage of different parts of speech gives different effect.

But the joy in reading this book isn't simply from her well-curated samples from literature; it is also from Tufte's writing itself, which often subtly uses the devices she's talking about. For example, consider the introduction to The Noun as Fragment:

A few years ago a staff member at a large university, cleaning out an old cabinet in the English department's offices, came across a neat black box. Inside were long-unused rubber stamps, twenty or more, apparently in the distant past employed to mark student papers. It is easy to visualize an overburdened writing teacher efficiently, firmly, perhaps even angrily, stamping with red ink the margins in stacks of student compositions: AWK. AGR. NOT CLR. CHOP. JARG. TRNS NDED. SPLT INF. COMM SPLS. RUN-ON. And what was probably regarded as the greatest of all sins, FRAG. I remember a teacher long ago who announced that any student paper containing a fragment automatically receiving an F, unless the student had labeled the fragment "intentional."

See what she did there? She introduced the concept of sentence fragments using a sentence fragment. This book is full of little clever moments like this for the astute reader, and though I read this book cover-to-cover, I'm sure I haven't caught them all. While the examples she uses are fun to read, I think the way Tufte uses the various parts of speech in her own writing is as educational than the examples she gives.