A very bad book offering the most appalling advice to budding writers. One gets the impression that the author has summarized every cliche about writing ever uttered without really knowing how to write a halfway decent book. One will not learn how to be a good writer from reading this book. Most of the pitfalls that it warms of are the very things that give writing color and make it interesting. ( )

If you are a writer, this is a book worth having. It is clear, concise, and it helps that there’s a large amount of humor throughout the text. I’ve read a few books on the writing/editing process recently, and this one is by far the best of the lot. I got the book from my local Library, so I’ve gone to the extreme measure of typing out the Table of Contents to refer back to until I am find a copy in a used bookstore. As it was published in 1992, I doubt that I’ll find it in any ‘big box’ store. I could relate to the examples the author gave, and am ever so grateful that they were short – unlike another book I reviewed recently, where an illustration went on for 12 pages and lost its relevance to the point the author was trying to make. Mr. Noble didn’t do that. He provided everything in clear prose, and did it all in 116 pages. What more could one ask for? ( )

There are only two kinds of writing: lively, warm personal prose that readers devour; and the rest. Should you sacrifice style on the altar of grammar? Are you chained to canon and convention? Are you bound to commit any of the blunders that strangle stories? In this book, William Noble shows you that some of the worst mistakes you can make involve sticking too strictly to "rules".