The Writer's Diet ─ A Guide to Fit Prose

This slim and lighthearted book shows writers of all kindsstudents and teachers, lawyers and librarianshow to put their prose on a diet. Helen Sword offers five simple principles for making prose less flabby” and more fit,” from using active verbs and concrete language to avoiding prepositional phrases, adjectives and adverbs, and waste words” such as it, this, that, and there. Each chapter includes examples of healthy prose from writers such as Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr., John McPhee, A. S. Byatt, and Richard Dawkins. The book also offers exercises for readers and can be used in conjunction with the website www.writersdiet.com, which allows users to enter and test the fitness of short passages of prose based on the principles in the book.

Helen Sword is professor and director of the Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland. She is the author, most recently, ofStylish Academic Writing and manages the website www.writersdiet.com.