Reviews for Getting the Words Right

The average rating for Getting the Words Right based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-11-15 00:00:00 Gregory Spannuth Pretty good, if somewhat overlong, book that gives you the basic rules for writing and revision to ensure that, whatever you're writing, you end up with the perfect message (principles which, I should add, I'm not using here!). Divided into 39 chapters, one for each "rule", Cheney argues quite effectively that the process splits into three basic principles, reduce, rearrange, and reword. This, of course, oversimplifies things horribly, but serves as a useful way of splitting up the book. I felt that the book loses its way in the middle a little, though perhaps it's not intended to be read from cover to cover in one go. The author does admit in the Afterword that if you've read the whole book, you probably have the patience to write one! However, it does end up on a very good high, the last chapter being devoted to common word mistakes and misunderstandings. While this could so easily have been a boring end, churning out the same old principles that schoolteachers have been preaching for years, it was actually a pretty fascinating quick-fire final round for the book, addressing some issues that I already knew about, and some that were completely new to me (who knew the difference between nauseous and nauseated? Not me!) The book is written by an American, and does suffer on occasion from US-English advice, though not too much, and some of the examples have clearly suffered from the "Kindle-ising" process - there was a section where the examples should clearly have had some form of crossing out or editing that just didn't appear in the Kindle version - but overall this is a good reference.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-01 00:00:00 Ryan Townsend I just could not finish this book. The first couple of chapters about editing were helpful, but the rest of it feels like it's written for middle schoolers who don't know how to put two words together... with about 100 times more words than is necessary to repeat his basic points over and over again. And he just keeps using examples from his own work only, which makes him seem pretty pompous, especially when the examples aren't that great.