This book was recommended in a slack channel I'm in, along with How to Write Short. The two books together helped her write better copy for a site she was developing. Having recently read Draft No. 4 and How to Write Short, I read this one, too.

The book has two big sections. The first section has a series of short sentences giving writing advice. The second section contains examples of writing, along with a critique of the examples. I enjoyed reading the second section. The first section annoyed me.

A series of short sentences would be fine if each of the lines were actually a complete sentence. Instead, the book is formated with choppy lines that break apart longer sentences.

So, imagine reading a book.

Where each line has a fragment of a sentence.

And you are supposed to know.

That it is actually a single sentence.

One naturally pauses at a period.

Which is not how this book is meant to read.

The pause habit is not breakable.

In a single book.

Yeah, so the first section annoyed me. Despite this annoyance, the advice is good. I was amused at how much of the advice I ignore, especially when it comes to pronouns. I am so bad with my use of pronouns. In particular, I use too many of them.

Anyway, main themes of the book:

1. Use short sentences, you don't need long sentences.

2. Have meaning in each sentence.

3. Trust yourself. Give yourself authority. Write about what interests you.

4. Notice things.

5. Don't use cliches. Question any sentence that appears unconsidered or "naturally."

6. Learn grammar so that you don't annoy the reader with bad grammar that they might not know about but can sense.

7. Writing is hard work, flow is a myth, "naturally" is, too.

8. Don't use an outline. Sure, take notes, use notes, but don't use an outline.

9. Don't talk down to the reader. Trust the reader.

10. Compose and edit at the same time.

I strongly disagree with the "don't use an outline" advise. At the risk of violating the "don't assume what the author meant" advice elsewhere in the book, perhaps Klinkenborg meant don't be a slave to the outline. Organizing a pile of notes into a coherent work is pretty much creating an outline on the fly. Outlines aren't abdicating thinking about one's writing, it's actively thinking about one's writing and creating a giant note about the direction one wants to go. Nothing wrong with that creation.

I'm not sure I recommend the book, despite learning a lot from it. I did remove a lot of pronouns in this review.

The biggest lesson I learned, however, was, "Don't format a prose book in poetry style, it annoys the reader."

Everything in this book is meant to be tested all over again, by you. You decide what works for you. This is perhaps the most important thing I have to say.
Page 2

Part of the struggle in learning to write is learning to ignore what isn’t useful to you and pay attention to what is.
Page 2

Here, in short, is what I want to tell you.

Know what each sentence says,

What it doesn’t say,

And what it implies.

Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.
Page 3

It’s hard to pay attention to what your words are actually saying. As opposed to what you mean to say or what you think they’re saying. Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial.
Page 4

Write these things down—the contents of the noise in your head as you write.
Page 6

These assumptions and prohibitions and obligations are the imprint of your education and the culture you live in.

Distrust them.
Page 6

What you don’t know and why you don’t know it are information too.
Page 7

The fact that you’ve included a word in the sentence you’re making Says nothing about its necessity.
Page 12

Implication is almost nonexistent in the prose that surrounds you,

The prose of law, science, business, journalism, and most academic fields.
Page 12

That means you don’t know how to use one of a writer’s most important tools:

The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow,

The ability to speak to the reader in silence.
Page 13

No two sentences are the same unless they’re exactly the same, word for word.

(And, in a lifetime of writing, it’s unlikely you’ll ever write the same sentence twice.)
Page 19

I laughed at this one.

The purpose of a sentence is to say what it has to say but also to be itself.
Page 21

No sentence can afford to be merely transitional.

If you’ve written clearly —

And you know what you’ve said and implied

As surely as you know what you haven’t said —

The reader will never get lost reading your prose

Or have trouble following you without transitions.
Page 25

In journalism, the equivalent of the topic sentence is the notorious “nut graf,”

A paragraph that tells you the content of the article you’re about to read,

As if you couldn’t proceed without a précis.
Page 26

I'm delighted to have learned about the nut graf in Draft No. 4.

If you love to read — as surely you must — you love being wherever you find yourself in the book you’re reading,

Happy to be in the presence of every sentence as it passes by,

Not biding your time until the meaning comes along.
Page 26

They recall the moment, as children, when we came upon the phrase

“And then one day.”

You know exactly how those four words feel.

You know exactly what they do.
Page 27

I love this. And then one day.

Were you asked to write in order to be heard, to be listened to?
Page 30

We forget something fundamental as we read:

Every sentence could have been otherwise but isn’t.

We can’t see all the decisions that led to the final shape of the sentence.

But we can see the residue of those decisions.
Page 32

Imagine the reason behind each sentence.

Why is it shaped just this way and not some other way?

Why that choice of words?

Why that phrasing?

Why that rhythm?
Page 34

What you write—what you send out into the world to be read—

Is the residue of the choices and decisions you make.

Choices and decisions you are responsible for.
Page 36

Start by learning to recognize what interests you.

Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter,

So they never learn how to notice,

Not even what interests them.

Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed,

Already sifted and sorted and categorized

By everyone else, by people with real authority.
Page 38

There’s always an urge among writers

To turn fleeting observations and momentary glimpses

Into metaphors and “material” as quickly as possible,

As if every perception ended in a trope,

As if the writer were a dynamo

Turning the world into words.
Page 40

Don’t let the word “years” alarm you.

Think of it as months and months and months and months.
Page 46

Yes!

This is surprisingly hard to do at first

Because our reading habits are impatient and extractive.
Page 49

And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible to yourself,

Camouflaged by familiarity.
Page 50

Try reading your work aloud.

The ear is much smarter than the eye,

If only because it’s also slower

And because the eye can’t see rhythm or hear unwanted repetition.
Page 50

How well you read aloud reveals how well you understand the syntax of a sentence.

Do you remember, in school, going around the room,

Each student in turn reading a paragraph out loud?

Remember how well some students read and others, how badly?

It was a difference in comprehension,

Not of the sentence’s meaning,

But of its texture, pace, structure, actuality.
Page 52

Don’t read straight through without stopping.

Read until your ear detects a problem.
Page 52

How many sentences begin with the subject?

How many begin with an opening phrase before the subject?

Or with a word like “When” or “Since” or “While” or “Because”?

How many begin with “There” or “It”?

What kinds of nouns do you see?

Abstractions? Generalizations?
Page 56

Are you using “with” as a preposition or as a false conjunction, a false relative pronoun?
Page 57

You don’t need to be an expert in grammar and syntax to write well.

But you do need to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.

Between active and passive constructions.

The relation between a pronoun and its antecedent.
Page 57

You need to look up even familiar words every time you have a doubt

And especially when you don’t have a doubt.

That is, very often. That is, every time you write.
Page 58

You’ve already looked up every word you don’t know.

Haven’t you?
Page 61

Oops.

So why not give up the idea of “flow” and accept the basic truth about writing?

It’s hard work, and it’s been hard work for everyone all along.
Page 67

The idea of writer’s block, in its ordinary sense,

Exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow.
Page 68

It’s always worth asking yourself if you can imagine saying a sentence

And adjusting it until you can.

Just as it’s always useful to ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to say?” The answer to that question is often the sentence you need to write down.
Page 74

Concentration, attention, excitement, will be part of your working state.

Daily.

Flow, inspiration—the spontaneous emission of sentences — will not.

That distinction is worth keeping in mind.
Page 77

Learn to write anywhere, at any time, in any conditions,

With anything, starting from nowhere.
Page 80

Composing a sentence always involves revision

Unless you write down the words of a sentence exactly as they pop into your head.

And why would you do that?
Page 86

So, you’ll be revising each sentence as you compose it.

Composing each sentence as you revise it.
Page 90

What writers fear most is running out of material.
Page 96

You want to begin the piece, not introduce it, which is the difference between a first sentence already moving at speed and a first sentence that wants to generalize while clearing its throat.
Page 102

Don’t get trapped by the thought of writing sequentially.
Page 104

We’re always hastening to be done writing,

But we’re also hastening to get out of the presence of our thoughts.

Everything about thinking makes us nervous.

We don’t believe there’s much of value to be found there.
Page 107

My thought was, "Who the f--- thinks this?"

The piece you’re writing is simply the one that happens to get written.
Page 108

How do you decide what works?

What do you do when your sentences seem to waver in quality and value before your eyes?

You read what you’ve written, and it looks good.

You read it again, and it looks bad.

You read it a third time, and now you can’t tell.
Page 110

You can almost never fix a sentence —

Or find the better sentence within it —

By using only the words it already contains.

If they were the right words already, the sentence probably wouldn’t need fixing.
Page 113

Accept it: you’ll surely fail again and just as surely succeed.

There’s nothing linear or steady in your growth as a writer.
Page 115

And yes, you may begin a sentence with “but.”
Page 119

YAY!

Use the simple past tense —

Avoiding the layering of several pasts —

And give the reader clear temporal clues when needed.
Page 121

Our lives are full of endings.

The sun goes down every day.

We ask for the check.

Eventually it comes.

How broad a hint does it take to make a reader who lives on a planet full of endings
Page 121

Why reproduce the whole scene when only one moment matters?
Page 123

A reader who’s opened a book to its first page is in a tender predicament,

Whether she’s standing in the aisle of a bookstore or sitting at home.

All the authority belongs to her — the authority to close the book.

And yet she’s willing — yearning — to surrender her authority to the author

And keep reading.
Page 127

You’ve been told again and again that you have to seduce the reader,

Sell the story in the very first paragraph.

(Nonsense, but it explains a lot of bad writing.)
Page 128

I laughed at this one, too.

No subject is so good that it can redeem indifferent writing.

But good writing can make almost any subject interesting.
Page 129

People clamor to tell their stories in words.

This doesn’t make them writers,

Nor does it make their stories matter.
Page 130

You may be used to denying your perceptions and dismissing your awareness.

You may be caught in a constant state of demurral.
Page 131

Watch for the chronic language of self-disparagement,

The moments when you say, “My problem is …” Or “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

If you say these kinds of things, you probably say them out of habit, almost unconsciously.

This is a product of your education too, at home and at school.

Pay attention to it.

Recognize how harmful it is.

Its message — subliminal and overt — is that your perceptions are worthless.

Do everything you can to subvert this habit.
Page 131

Part of the trouble may be this:
You’re afraid your ideas aren’t good enough,
Your sentences not clever or original enough.
Page 132

It’s surprising how often ideas that seem obvious to you
Are in no way apparent to the reader.
And vice versa.
What seems like common sense to you may come as a revelation to the reader.
Page 132

Some people think that discipline is imposed from without,
Regular hours, strict containment, rigorous exclusion.
Some people think discipline is revealed from within,
Enlightenment, purity, solidity of intent.
Discipline is nothing more than interest and expectation, a looking forward.
It’s never hard to work when you’re interested in what you’re working on.
Page 133

But what if you hate what you’re working on?

It helps to examine the content of your loathing.

What is it you hate?

The movement of your ideas?

The nature of your prose?

The obligations and prohibitions you still secretly honor?
Page 134

It’s surprising how often the trouble with a piece of writing

Has nothing to do with the writing itself.
Page 134

One of the most powerful feelings a writer experiences while working

Is a sense of obligation, of having to make a sentence or a paragraph

This way or that way, being obliged to write that sentence or that paragraph.

It’s a terrible feeling and always a sign of trouble.
Page 136

Don’t preconceive the reader’s limitations.

They’ll become your own.
Page 139

The books that trusted you most may be the ones you love best.
Page 140

You’re not responsible for your readers’ ignorance,

And they’re not responsible for your erudition.
Page 145

“Done” isn’t absolute or arbitrary.

Nor is it really about learning your limits as a writer.

It’s a compromise.
Page 146

“Done enough” sounds too callow to describe the compromise,

So call it “perfection enough,”

As perfect as possible under the circumstances.
Page 147

The better question now is the more fearful one: “How will I know when to stop revising?”
Page 148

Let yourself ask the question why.

Why is the author choosing this word, writing that sentence that way?

Don’t expect to find an answer.

Expect to find some possibilities.
Page 162

This passage has no larger purpose than to exist, to work out, for a moment, the possibilities of some sentences.
Page 166

Reading these sentences — and my commentary on them — you’ll be tempted to side with the writer, to think, “I know what he means” or “I can see what she’s saying.” But that’s because it feels so normal to try to deduce the meaning of the sentence instead of observing what its words actually say.

We’re so trained to read for meaning — to look through the sentence to what we think is the author’s intention—that in our search for it we’re prepared to disregard the literal significance of the prose itself.
Page 169

Don’t make time or frequency an attribute of the vehicle. Let the time or frequency indicator stand on its own. Cars flash past us now and then.
Page 184

He hunched his shoulders, placed one arm on his left leg, and slid into the passenger seat before reaching across his body for his seatbelt.

Can you actually visualize this action? No. Descriptions of physical action require incredible care because we read them with our bodies as well as our brains.
Page 185

Her clothes were nondescript, a white t-shirt and jean shorts.

And yet the writer can describe them. How about She wore a white T-shirt and jean shorts?
Page 193

Dying!

I spotted this book in a Waterstone in Amsterdam, but couldn't find it locally. Public libraries FTW!

I was expecting in this book a list of here are things you can do to increase your intelligence. In an ideal world, it would include variations based on gender, age, and weight - something like "do this, this, and that and you'll be smarter." Of course, one's expectations should be kept to a minimum, as life has a way of being, regardless of expectations.

The first part of the book is about defining intelligence (which isn't that easy to do, and we haven't done it well), and the history of defining intelligence, in all its ugly forms of repression and genocide that resulted. We humans really do like to create an us versus them about everything.

After defining intelligence, there were the ethics of what to do with intelligence, is it morally okay to increase one's intelligence? Atheletes are banned from performance enhancing drugs, is the mental realm any different when attempting to get an advantage?

The book did have three suggestions for increasing intelligence: modafanil, electric brain stimulation, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (which is a different way of getting the same as the electrical stimulation, just with a different electricity-producing mechanism, what with moving magnetic fields creating electric currents and all).

Experiments with increasing intelligence suffer the same fate as pretty much all cutting edge science: the bad results are ignored, the good results are emphasized, no one knows if things really work, there are no control studies, people are all different enough that we'll always have warnings, and it's all the wild west with the experimenting.

The book had a lot of anecdotes, most of which were amusing and interesting. The book was a fun, easy read, if not exactly satisfying in its lack of do this, this, and that to be smarter.

Teachers in these new schools were stunned. Large numbers of their pupils appeared unable or unwilling to learn. These teachers were some of the first to wrestle with a social problem that has split the field of education ever since: how to teach a class of children of mixed ability, while not ignoring the different needs of the children at the top and bottom.
Location 335

When school is mandatory, you will have people who don't want to learn in the school, making the classes difficult for those who do want to learn.

High IQ is linked to creativity, musical ability, securing patents and winning artistic prizes. The higher a person’s IQ, the less likely they are to hold racist and sexist beliefs. They are less likely to be religious and more likely to be interested in politics. They are less tolerant of authoritarian attitudes.
Location 409

This could explain the United States really well right now.

It does explain one sibling at least.

It is better to believe intelligence can be increased. Those children who believe the opposite, that intelligence is fixed (called the entity theory), are more anxious about how much intelligence they have, and it not being enough for them to succeed. These children refuse opportunities to learn if they carry a risk of doing poorly. They conceal or lie about their weaknesses, rather than identify and improve them. And they indulge in what psychologists call self-handicapping –procrastination and watching television the night before a test instead of studying. This gives them a ready-made excuse if they score badly.
Location 647

No idea who this could be describing.

Nope. None.

While that might demonstrate that repeated use and practice of a set of mental skills can grow a specific brain region, the conclusion doesn’t really work the other way around: finding an enlarged hippocampus in a plumber from Aberdeen wouldn’t guarantee she could tell you the quickest route to drive from London Bridge to King’s Cross Station.
Location 1199

No, but it does demonstrate that repeated use and practice of a set of mental skills can grow a specific brain region. You might not know what those skills are, but you know they have been developed.

The most reliable group of people to sire intelligent children are, simply, intelligent adults (of all colours and nationalities), just as taller parents (of all colours and nationalities) tend to have taller kids. When it comes to intelligence, nature can be cruel and unsentimental, but it does not pick sides.
Location 1489

The irony is that the smarter a society is, the fewer kids they will have.

Implicit skills are harder to teach, because attention has to be deliberately drawn away from performance. Tennis players, for example, can be taught implicitly to read the direction of an opponent’s serve by being asked to judge the speed and not the direction of the ball. In doing so, they learn to identify and act upon the visual cues that indicate direction, without knowing or being able to explain how they do so.
Location 2026

I find this interesting, that artificially turning off the thinking brain can improve developing sports performance.

That’s a common feature of many forms of synaesthesia; people with the condition are often astonished to discover (and some discover it late in life) not everybody experiences the world the way they do.
Location 2396

Britain was a kinder place then, many said, and less willing to ridicule people who were proud of their talents and abilities.
Location 2696

When people say things like, ‘nearly half of Americans have an IQ of under 100’ as a criticism, they reveal more about their own intelligence than anyone else’s.
Location 2732

This cracked me up.

We have a curious relationship with intelligence these days. Rather than looking down on people with lower IQs, as was common when the feeble-minded were ridiculed, much public scorn is reserved today for those towards the upper end of the scale. Perhaps this is down to envy and jealousy, as the benefits of mental ability become more pronounced, or maybe it’s a reflection of a society that has fallen out of love with expertise.
Location 2733

With the Internet and answers immediately available, people have lost the ability to understand expertise, to understand the passion, to understand the effort involved with becoming an expert. They think oh, I can just look up the answer, instead of understanding the why of things.

Some surveys suggest as many as one in five girls and one in ten boys at secondary schools hide their ability at maths, chiefly to avoid being picked on and bullied.
Location 2743

The tone of the coverage of such cases is almost gloating, as if these young prodigies somehow made claims with their early high achievement that they could not justify; as if their unusual intelligence was a deliberate ploy to annoy the rest of us. Of all the sins of youth, cognitive precociousness seems one of the hardest to forgive.
Location 2767

People do love a fallen hero.

Common sense is typically described as a kind of practical intelligence.† It’s usually measured as a judgement on someone’s decision making, but the verdict on whether someone shows common sense or not seems to come down to whether or not the person doing the judging agrees with the particular decision made.
Location 2785

They simply can’t resist the temptation to continue to deploy their abstract problem-solving skills in even familiar situations, for which the best options have already been approved by the rest of the community. They are driven to find novel solutions, at the expense of the tried and trusted common sense. And many of these ideas are wrong, or worse, ridiculous.
Location 2795

This is the idea that intelligent people don't have common sense. That intelligent people want to improve things even when the rest of the community is okay with sufficient, is a good thing, not something to be scorned. But, hey, stupid people, they mock what they don't have.

‘Common sense,’ Einstein said, ‘is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.’
Location 2811

To think rationally is to act according to one’s goals and beliefs. But it is also to form and hold beliefs supported by available evidence.
Location 2917

Which is why any Republican who supports Cheetoh these days is clearly not thinking rationally.

One of the most important is the myside or confirmation bias –the way people gather and assess evidence tends to be in line with their existing opinions.
Location 2920

Most of us get a single shot at most opportunities to prove ourselves, and we have to live with the results.
Location 3262

Unearned privilege can be uncomfortable to associate with human value, for it carries too many reminders of the straitjacket of social stratification and the entitlement of the aristocracy. We prefer people to work for what they have, and expect rewards and status for those who do so.
Location 3303

Cognitive enhancement offers a new twist on this century-old argument. If intelligence, in whatever form, is something people have to work for, if cognitive ability can be trained and improved and released with effort, then it’s pretty simple to make the case that neuroenhancement undermines this effort and is cheating. If one person has access to a short-cut others do not, then the playing field is tilted in their favour. Yet if intelligence is an immutable quality spread across the population, with some landing more in the heads of a fortunate minority, then the playing field is already biased against the rest. Why shouldn’t those who lose out in the lottery of life have the chance to turn to technology to close the gap? Only when all have the identical chance and the baseline is levelled, can the performance of any human ability be truly said to reflect value, or more accurately, can the difference in performance be said to reflect higher or lower value.
Location 3307