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Inside the Cover Book Review Review by Liz Scott
Five Fast Steps to Better Writing 20th Anniversary Edition By Barbara Florio Graham Simon Teakettle Ink 2005 Writing-related
Five Fast Steps to Better Writing is a helpful little book that delves into the nitty-gritty of the writing process. When Barbara Florio Graham first published this book in 1985, she intended it for all writing forms, from informal business memos to lengthy academic texts. Twenty years later, most of her suggestions still hit the target for writers of all kinds.
The five steps Graham presents are easy to put into use quickly. I used many of her suggestions to write this review!
The first step, planning, is arguably the most important step Graham discusses. She insists that any piece of writing be thoroughly planned, researched, and outlined before the writer puts fingers to keyboard. Her left-brain, right-brain outlining technique is both simple and ingenious.
Step two is the writing of the "lousy first draft." Her approach is kamikaze-style-- just sit down and write the draft and get it over with. Don't worry about the finer points of organization, grammar, and sentence structure yet. NaNoWriMo aficionados will recognize and embrace this methodology.
You get to go back and revise in step three. In this step, Graham encourages writers to take a hard look at the structure of their draft. She advocates going back to the outline and restructuring the piece if necessary. Good instructions also give readers tips on adding, subtracting, and rearranging content. However, it is in step three that the book's age begins to show. Graham advocates reformatting a piece (by changing margins and such) to make it longer or shorter. In an Internet-based writing culture, where all copy is written, sent, and reformatted electronically, this advice isn't relevant.
Steps four and five are all about grammar. I am one of those obnoxious people Graham mentions who can "just see" when a sentence looks right and when it doesn't. But even for me, there are many great ideas in these two steps. Perhaps the most important of these is in the verbs-- strong verbs make strong sentences that make strong writing.
Some of the writing on grammar verges on the pedantic; this makes for a dry read. The occasional bit of outdated advice creeps into these two chapters, and some of the problems of revising and proofreading in the electronic age were not addressed. I wished for a section on the perils of spell checking, along with a list of common words spell-checkers miss, but did not find one. Also, it disconcerted me to stumble across several typos in the polishing step.
Happily, the out-of-date problems in the main text do not extend to the resource lists in the appendices. These sections contain extensive lists of websites for everything from copyright law to statistics to self-publishing. Don't skip the articles in the appendices! They are relevant, entertaining, and in some cases hilarious.
While this was not the best book on writing I've ever read, I found enough useful information in it to make it worth my while. If you're looking for a few quick tips to improve your prose, or a handy guide to correcting common grammar problems, pick up a copy.
E-MAIL Books@SimonTeakettle.com TO ORDER THE BOOK.
Liz Scott is a part-time freelance
writer and full-time technical writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her
life's dream is never again to begin a book with the sentence "Insert the CD
into the CD-ROM drive."
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