The Writer's Diet

by Helen Sword

Is your writing flabby or fit? If your sentences are weighed down with passives and prepositions, be-verbs and waste words, The Writer’s Diet is for you. This book will help you energise your writing and strip unnecessary padding from your prose.

The Writer’s Diet offers a short, sharp introduction to great writing. Through the online test at www.writersdiet.com and the analysis and examples in this book, Helen Sword teaches writers of all kinds – students to teachers, lawyers to librarians – how to transform flabby sentences into active, energetic prose.

The book and the website enable writers to diagnose their writing for flab – passives and prepositions, weak verbs and waste words – and energise their work by stripping away unnecessary padding. The rules of good writing are deceptively simple but this book helps writers to see those principles at work, through examples by stylish authors from Charles Dickens to John McPhee.

First published in 2007, The Writer’s Diet became a bestselling handbook and now returns refreshed alongside a new version of www.writersdiet.com. The book will highlight your bad habits and sharpen your style – for clearer, crisper sentences filled with words that count.

Who says nutritious material must be bland? This short book is packed with excellent advice on writing, offered with charm and good cheer. –Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.

‘Does my style look big in this?’ The Writer’s Diet shows us how to measure our verbal shape honestly and unflinchingly in private, see what we need to tone, and train in simple steps that we can all enjoy. Concise, punchy, engaging, practical, effective, Helen Sword’s instant classic has become even fitter in this new edition. – Professor Brian Boyd, the University of Auckland

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Self Help, Professional Development

98 pages, Paperback

First published August 7, 2007

Reviews

[Simone]

To begin with, let me point out how criminally expensive this book is. I bought it from the publisher's website for $31 NZD and the book is the tiniest thing I have ever read. (Before you hate on me for my own stupidity I needed to buy the book for my Web Writing course)

Now let the review proceed:
The Writer's Diet attempts to "trim down" your own writing by giving you guidelines on how to make your text more readable. So you would assume it makes it's points clearly and uses relevant examples to keep you on the right path? It doesn't. Instead it uses poems and Shakespearean texts as examples. And that's fine if you're into that kind of stuff; but for us average Joe Bloggs we don't know what the heck Shakespeare was on about and assume he was probably on drugs during writing periods. So, that being said, I was still in the dark as to what writing is good and what's bad.

If you nearly failed English (like me) this book is not for you. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs, hedgehogs... It's all incredibly overwhelming.
The Writer's Diet preaches to the choir and closes the door to heathens.

[Jory Bayne]

Fantastic little book for writers to better hone their craft. Never before have I been so aware of the volume of “waste words” in my writing. Oof!

[Samuel Kassing]

Sword’s book aided my writing process by exposing my propensity to over write. Short. Simple. Smart. This is how I would describe her advice.

[JL]

A succinct book with simple but essential tips on writing.

5 sacred rules:

1. Use active verbs whenever possible

2. Favour concrete language over vague abstractions

3. Avoid long strings of prepositional phrases

4. Employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence

5. Reduce your dependence on four pernicious 'waste words': it, this, that and there

[Daniel Bouchoc]

Really good.

[Tara Brabazon]

Oh no. I thought this short book would be terrific. This book is wasting a great metaphor. Fit writing is a great phrase, with metaphors of exercise, dieting and training all finding a place.

But this is too basic and chaotic in its argument. Page upon page I pondered the point of the prose.

A fine writer who drained the power of a great idea.

[Jonathan Ammon]

This pamphlet is worth a dollar or two and contains good advice and exercises. It is not a full book and should not be sold as one.

[Mary Vogelsong]

Where’s the beef? Slim volume with little substance.

[Fady]

The book started with a great promise; a concise writing guide. The basic argument is nothing new, which is how to write plain English. When I compared the quality of "Writer's Diet" to the classic manual "Elements of Style", I found Mrs Sword did not add much. Many other excellent guides in the market can offer a succinct direction, without using the "diet" analogy. The book itself is not very readable from my point of view. It is vague and lacks cohesion.

[Emily]

Nothing beats The Elements of Style, but I still found reading The Writer's Diet invigorating as I ponder my own academic writing. Her tips are simple, but effective:

1. VERBS // Avoid passive voice and boring "be" verbs. Instead choose active and intersting verbs. (I find myself relying on a handful of old standbys, so the obvious advice to read widely, take note of new verbs to try, etc. rang true.

2. NOUNS // Avoid "nominalizations"--that is, nouns formed from verbs, adjectives, or other nouns, making them more diffuse to understand and also more wordy within sentences e.g. "students engaged" is better than "students demonstrated their engagement." Like every writing instructor, she encourages us to "show not tell" and avoid abstract nouns and concepts, which can feel like a bit of a head scratcher given the nature of academic work, but I found her "diet test" useful for tabulating how an author can make a paragraph of only abstract concepts more concise, thus opening word count for specific examples, using more concrete nouns.

3. PREPOSITIONS // Vary prepositions and favor dynamic choices (e.g. over, through) over static ones (e.g. in, of). Avoid using too many prepositions in a row as they impede readability. A useful tip for diagnosing preposition overload: don't have more than 12 words between a noun and its verb.

4. ADJECTIVES & ADVERBS // Use such descriptors judiciously, something akin to Chanel's rule of taking off one piece of jewelry, so that one's writing doesn't grow too flowery or amateur. Also, consider if what you actually need is a more illustrative verb, e.g. "she sauntered" rather than "she walked happily."

5. WASTE WORDS // Beware it, this, that, and there, as these words can obscure meaning and/or clunk of sentences, in the case of "that."

Although I wish the author didn't deploy the fat phobic metaphor of writing fitness versus fatness, I did find this very brief guide a useful tuneup to my own writing approach.

[Hamish]

Short, to the point. Good book.

The core idea seems to be: keep writing simple. It can be simpler than you realize. Stick to SVO structure as much as possible, using lemmas where you can. Spice up your writing with variety, rather than complexity. Create vivid mental animations via concrete nouns and specific, active verbs. Prepositions are garbage. Ad-words (adjectives and adverbs) are mostly garbage. But worst of all are demonstratives and pronouns, which invite ambiguity, fuzzy thinking, and grammatical complexity. Avoid like the plague. Similarly, starting sentences with "there is" often leads to sweeping generalizations. Similarly, avoid.

Expanding on the animation idea, I suspect a good mental framework is this: you are animating a scene in your reader's brain. Each sentence should encode the transition to the next key frame. For example, "left hand moves from here to there", "door opens".

[Quinn]

Is your writing flabby or fit? If your sentences are weighed down with passives and prepositions, be-verbs and waste words, The Writer's Diet is for you. This book will help you energise your writing and strip unnecessary padding from your prose.

The Writer's Diet offers a short, sharp introduction to great writing. Through the online test at www.writersdiet.com and the analysis and examples in this book, Helen Sword teaches writers of all kinds – students to teachers, lawyers to librarians – how to transform flabby sentences into active, energetic prose.

The book and the website enable writers to diagnose their writing for flab – passives and prepositions, weak verbs and waste words – and energise their work by stripping away unnecessary padding. The rules of good writing are deceptively simple but this book helps writers to see those principles at work, through examples by stylish authors from Charles Dickens to John McPhee.

...

[Vance Gloster]

Good, but fairly basic information that may be of less use to writers who are accomplished self-editors. Sword has a very useful online tool that will analyze a 100-1000 word snippet of prose for four excesses common among writers who do not have significant editing training and experience. And even those with significant editing skills can have occasional lapses. The tool can be found here:

http://www.writersdiet.com/test.php

The Writer's Diet book expands on the reasons why and how these excesses negatively affect the quality and effectiveness of your writing, as well as best practices in regard to them. It provides good information, and is a great resource for quickly improving the quality of your prose.

[Caitlin van Hoffen]

Nothing in this was particularly groundbreaking to me (actually, I'd never really thought about preposition choice before so I'll give Sword that one) but it was really interesting getting it all in one concise book with only five brief chapters. As someone who reads a lot of academic writings, I found it nice to think that maybe one day they will be easier/more interesting to read. If only they would follow these guidelines!

P.S I'd hate to put this review through her online Writer's Diet test because it would probably get a pretty low score!

[Jas]

I think this book has some truly helpful writing tips, but is let down by the fatphobic framework. The act of writing isn't something that needs to add more shame to people about their bodies. I'm also a bit skeptical in how useful these tips are in academic writing - true, there is a lot of florid and impenetrable academic prose, but sometimes you do need "academic ad-words" because they are specific concepts, more complex than the root noun or verb.

[Luke Anderson]

Every writer should read this book. Really, anyone who wants to read better, or think more clearly, should read it. Sword offers several principles for writing with clarity, precision, and power. I will never look at another piece of writing the same. It’s amazing how much gold she manages to share in a mere 73-page book—a testament to her skill, and one that proves she practices what she preaches. Thank you, Professor Sword.

[Amanda Himes]

I started reading TWD with the hope that it could benefit my English I students, but it committed the cardinal sins of being boring . . . And sometimes wrong. If Lincoln's Gettysburg Address gets a poor rating, then Sword's system is out of whack. And "Sailing to Byzantium"? THAT "is no country for old men" refers to an Ireland unappreciative of the speaker, not the imagined destination of the poem's title.

[Jordan B]

While I personally find Hemingway-esque minimalism in writing to be overrated, I think Sword makes very good points about balance. It's not about constructing minimalistic sentences, it's about choosing high value words. Good advice! It also has a helpful online test for your writing to see how to stack up. I had Fit & Trim! Woo!

[Gabby Gilliam]

This book doesn't have much novel advice to offer. It's short and to the point. Would be most beneficial to someone who's never read a book about writing. The most helpful bit for me was the online writing test that accompanies this book. It was neat to see the weak points of my writing laid out so clearly. Will definitely be helpful when self-editing.

[Bruna]

It really is a "short, sharp introduction to great writing". Reminds me of the "For Dummies" books. Simple language and straight to the point. It is a great beginner's book for people who have an interest in writing.

[Connor]

Truly exceptional. You know a book like this is good when it makes you aware of your inadequacies in concrete, measurable ways. “The Writer’s Diet” is wonderfully concise, but it gives you diagnostic tools instead of stuffy opinions. All I know is I need to lose some weight.

[Margaret]

This book was a gift to me, and it is full of good tips about writing active and engaging prose. I enjoyed it. But some of these tips are pretty obvious and available on different websites/blogs about writing.

[Brianna Lambert]

Really helpful short little book on five key changes to make in your writing. I appreciated the brevity of the book and all the examples. I think it's one I need to keep my notes from handy and go back to again and again!

[Debra Laughlin]

Excellent resource to use to tighten the writing style. Short. Sweet. Useful..

[Jessica]

A hands-on approach to decreasing the lard factor in your writing. Has worked wonders for me, and I anticipate returning to it again and again to rework the exercises.

[James Traxler]

Great instruction on how to make your writing leaner and more direct.

[Trina Pion]

The Writer's Diet helped me pinpoint and improve some problem areas within my writing in a clear and concise way.

[Manos]

An excellent brief and concise book on academic writing. A brilliant introduction to academic writing.

[Mark]

Incredibly helpful little book that serves as a great refresher, a reminder to avoid lazy and opaque writing. Practical, brief and clear.

[Preethika]

It is a good book to make your language jargon