Luciano’s Reviews > Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Blurbs, Writing Tips, Literary Folklore and Publishing Secrets > Status Update

I got through 2 banger chapters at the end of part 3. Willder shows her writing knowledge and experience as she explains things that you kind of subconsciously know, but feel like you’re learning them for the first time with how she words it.

“Be a magpie” is the first section of Chapter 3, all about writing better copy. This section focuses on our reliance on adjectives. Willder distilled similar thoughts I’ve had while writing into actual coherent prose helping to reaffirm what I thought and how I can deal with it now.

Summary: adjectives often tell a reader how to feel, instead of using the words to let them feel that organically.

“Orwell Rules” discusses George Orwell’s rules of writing in relation to the clarity and concision of language. It also contains the history of many rules of writing I’ve been taught without ever really thinking further than to accept.
Lastly, it is filled to the brim with examples of maliciously unclear language that feels appropriate in today’s political climate.

This part of Chapter 2 highlighted the effectiveness of Charles Dickens in his time, specifically in relation to the way he published which contributed to this grand sense of mystery and finding out, referred to as a “hermeneutic code”.
I haven’t read any Dickens, but now I sure want to.

The second part of Chapter 2 talks about the history of books, in relation to their advertisement. I cannot fathom when Willder talks about books without covers, with title pages serving as those covers. As she touches on in the end, we come from an age where we are marketed to literally every minute. Seeing these earlier advertisements for books makes me wonder how these readers were at all convinced.

Part 1 of Chapter 2 focuses on the history and principles of blurbs. I found this part to be, so far, the most informative and interpretable in the book. Willder’s experience and connections to those so ingrained in publishing provide a lot of insight and knowledge into not only blurb-writing, but writing as a whole.

Presented principles seem applicable to all aspects of writing, even scientific abstracts.