The Sense of Structure : Writing from the Reader's Perspective

Rating:
Summary: The best book on writing English extant
Review: The author, George Gopen, is a professor of rhetoric and a consultant to many firms about writing. Gopen presents a different approach to writing---one that focuses on what a reader is likely to glean from your writing. Thus, he assumes you are writing to communicate with another person, rather than simply to please yourself. If this is true, and it almost always will be, then Gopen's techniques cannot be bested. He concentrates on "tools, not rules," with the paramount concern being whether the reader is likely to understand the writer's intention.

His techniques are largely structural, based on current research into how readers of English read. His techniques, moreover, are objective, which solves the problem of how to edit your own work so that it will mean to a reader what it means to you. Gopen also provides practical tips on how to structure both sentences and paragraphs for proper emphasis. He demonstrates how to manipulate the story being told to ensure the reader is not left in the dark about what is being communicated. He concludes with a non-dogmatic guide to punctuation and grammatical tools, designed to improve communication under various circumstances.

To learn the specific techniques, read Gopen's book. I assure you that you will never have encountered a better approach to writing.