The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose

Description

First published in 1947, The Reader Over Your Shoulder remains required reading for anyone who wants to write more clearly and artfully. Here editor Alan Hodge and author Robert Graves tells the reader to write as if 'a crowd of prospective readers were looking over their shoulder', anticipating possible questions and criticisms. They identifies the most common blunders writers make and lay out 41 principles showing how to avoid them. Their insights are as fresh as they were 70 years ago, and indispensable to writers of English prose.

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was a preeminent English poet, novelist, critic, translator, and scholar of classical mythology. He served in World War I--an experience recounted in his 1929 autobiography, Good-Bye to All That--and later became the first professor of English literature at the University of Cairo. Best remembered today for his acclaimed historical novels about the Roman emperor Claudius, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, his other books include The White Goddess, The Hebrew Myths, and Collected Poems.Alan Hodge (1915-1979) was a historian and editor. In addition to The Reader Over Your Shoulder, he collaborated with Graves on Work in Hand, a poetry collection, and The Long Week-End, a social history of Britain during the First and Second World War. Patricia T. O'Conner, a former staff editor at The New York Times Book Review, is the author of five books on language, most recently Origins of the Specious, written with her husband, Stewart Kellerman. Her first book, Woe Is I, has half a million copies in print and will soon appear in a fourth edition. She and Mr. Kellerman blog about the English language at http: //www.grammarphobia.com.

"The best book on writing ever published." -Patricia T. O'Conner, from the introduction "A never-ending pragmatic pleasure." -Ralph Nader "The Reader Over Your Shoulder is subtitled A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, but it is also an inspiration for readers. I don't know any other book in which expository prose is read so seriously, carefully, helpfully. For this reason, the book is just as important as I. A. Richard's Practical Criticism, in which the attempts of Cambridge undergraduate students of English Literature reading certain passages of English verse were produced and examined. That book transformed the teaching of literature in the universities by showing that the governing assumptions about reading and interpretation were mostly wrong. If our educational systems were sound, The Reader Over Your Shoulder could have the same effect on the teaching of expository writing by showing what the reading of such prose entails. The questions Graves and Hodge ask, the objections they raise to the particular sentences exhibited, are never pedantic; they arise from a decision to take the prose seriously." -Denis Donoghue in The New York Times "To see what really expert mavens can do in applying their rule-based expertise to clearing up bad prose, get hold of a copy of The Reader Over Your Shoulder, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge--not the modern paperback reprint, with its ruinous cuts, but the original 1943 edition, published by Macmillan . It is one of the three or four books on usage that deserve a place on the same shelf with Fowler." -Mark Halpern in The Atlantic