How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them

Ben Yagoda’s How to Not Write Bad uses this basic tenet to illustrate how we can all write better, clearer, and for a wider readership. He offers advice on what he calls ‘not-writing-badly,’ which consists of the ability, first, to craft sentences that are correct in terms of spelling, diction (word choice), punctuation, and grammar, and that also display clarity, precision, and grace. Then he focus on crafting whole paragraphs -

the cadence, consistency of tone, word repetition, sentence transitions, and paragraph length. In a comprehensive, fun guide, Yagoda lays out the simple steps we can all take to make our writing more effective, more interesting, and just plain better.

Simply, this is a book for anyone who wants to improve his or her writing. Yagoda provides clear grammatical rules to help students and writers everywhere write better; not bad. As ‘lolspeak’ and texts take over out linguistic consciousness, Yagoda emphasizes the lost art of grammar and the well-constructed sentence.