BOOK REVIEW: Fine-Tune Your Writing -- Or Learn How to Do It In the First Place -- with 'The GETTYSBURG Approach to Writing & Speaking'
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
Almost exactly three years ago (how time flies when you're having fun!) I reviewed Philip A. Yaffe's "In the 'I' of the Storm," a wonderful short book about writing and speaking like a professional (link to my review: http://www.hintonnews.net/columns/070411-kinchen-review.html).
I praised Yaffe's down-to-earth approach to teaching expository writing -- the kind used in journalism and business -- and said that the book contained great advice and was itself beautifully written. This is not always the case with books on writing: Many of them are poorly written, difficult to understand and worse than useless.
Phil Yaffe has revised and rewritten his slim guide into an even better book, "The GETTYSBURG Approach to Writing & Speaking Like a Professional" (Indi Best, Indi Publishing Group, 275 pages, $14.00, available on Amazon.com). About the title: Yaffe, a professional journalist, graduate of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and resident of Brussels, Belgium for more than 30 years, says the 272 words of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address "incorporates all the fundamental principles, and many of the tips and techniques I hope to teach in this book."
He adds: "Throughout the writing of this book, Lincoln's miniature masterpiece was my constant inspiration. In only 272 carefully crafted words, Lincoln says more than most people could say in several thousand."
Yaffe provides -- in Appendix J -- a line-by-line analysis of the Gettysburg Address. However, on pages 11 and 12 he presents the complete text, to inspire writers to emulate Lincoln at the start of the book. Who can argue with such an approach to clear, concise expository writing? Not I!
What's the difference between expository writing and creative writing? Yaffe explains that everybody is hard-wired to read creative writing -- short stories, novels, poems, radio plays, television plays, movie screenplays. Creative writing aims to amuse and entertain.
With expository writing -- memos, reports, proposals, training manuals, newsletters, research papers -- the fundamental purpose is to instruct and inform. The writer has to make the reader WANT to read what he/she writes because, as Yaffe puts it: "no one wants to read what I am going to write. Most people don't want to be instructed and informed. They would much prefer to be doing something else."
As in his first book, Yaffe praises good journalistic writing, especially the "inverted pyramid" style of writing that we journalists use as second nature. In the "inverted pyramid," the important information goes in at the beginning of the story, with each subsequent paragraph containing less important details. This was designed for print journalists, to make it easier for editors to trim the story as needed for updated editions. With the digital age, it's not necessary, but it's still a good discipline.
Yaffe provides specific examples and advice on grammar and style; this is important because grammar is rarely taught these days. I learned to my surprise that it's possible for an English major to graduate at many colleges and universities these days without taking a formal grammar course. This was not the case at my alma mater, Northern Illinois University, where I graduated in the class of 1961, and I'm sure it wasn't the case when Yaffe graduated from UCLA a few years later. We had to take a course in English grammar.
To borrow a passage from my review of Yaffe's first book:
"This [the emphasis on studying good newspaper writing] may sound self-serving, since both Yaffe and the present reviewer have worked on major newspapers, but he's absolutely correct. Outstanding writers like Ernest Hemingway and Tom Wolfe honed their skills as newspapermen and the best mystery writers who aren't lawyers are almost always recovering journalists."
I want to emphasize something that Yaffe touches on: Good writing is rewriting. My advice: Give it your best shot and read it aloud. Let it alone for a while, order a DVD on Amazon or check your eBay file or do the dishes piling up in the sink. Then go back and read the passage again. If it makes sense but sounds a little rough around the edges, you might just have to tweak it a bit, but if it sounds stiff and stilted, a rewrite is called for.
Effective writing and speaking are critical for all students and professionals in this challenging and competitive world. Professional level writing and speaking depend on only a handful of easy-to-understand principles. "The Gettysburg Approach" goes straight to the foundations, defines these principles and explains how to apply them. Through a variety of examples and simple exercises, Yaffe's book will help anyone -- even those of us who think we know everything about the craft of writing -- sharpen their skills and rapidly learn to write and speak clearly, concisely, and persuasively.
I recommend "The GETTYSBURG Approach" wholeheartedly, and if you have a copy of Yaffe's first book, that slim volume, too. Keep the book -- I recommend the new one -- handy at your writing area and you'll find that improvement in your writing will be evident in a few days or weeks. Professional athletes need coaches, and so do professional writers. Phil Yaffe is a good coach.
About the Author
Philip A. Yaffe is an author, former feature writer with the Wall Street Journal and a marketing communication consultant. Born in Boston in 1942, he grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from UCLA. He teaches writing and public speaking in Brussels where he has lived for more than thirty years.