Pegasus Book Club

Since its first publication in 1976, On Writing Well by William Zinsser has become a classic guide on writing nonfiction. It has sold millions of copies and still is the number one book on writing nonfiction.

According to New York Times, “On Writing Well is a bible for a generation of writers looking for clues to clean, compelling prose.”

The book has four parts in addition to an introduction, a bibliography and an index. The first part—Principles—contains seven chapters and deals with important aspects of writing like how to write clear, simple, and concise prose, the need and importance of reviewing, editing, and rewriting, how to avoid clutter, the importance of mastering the fundamentals, how to identify your audience and write for them, how to find the right words and where to find them, and so on. This section contains one of the most useful advices of this book:

The point is that you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up. You must know what the essential tools are and what job they were designed to do. Extending the metaphor of carpentry, it’s first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly and to drive nails. Later you can bevel the edges or add elegant finials, if that’s your taste. But you can never forget that you are practicing a craft that’s based on certain principles. If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.

I’ll admit that certain nonfiction writers, like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, have built some remarkable houses. But these are writers who spent years learning their craft, and when at last they raised their fanciful turrets and hanging gardens, to the surprise of all of us who never dreamed of such ornamentation, they knew what they were doing. Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.

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INDLISH: The Book for Every English-Speaking Indian by Jyoti Sanyal is about fighting commercialese, officialese, and legalese and promoting the use of plain English. Indlish is a compilation of Sanyal’s articles on plain English first printed in his column in The Statesman. Sanyal was formerly Dean of Asian College of Journalism, Bangalore, and an assistant editor with The Statesman, Calcutta. Now he is part of Clear English India, which encourages people to use good contemporary English instead of Raj-day commercialese, officialese, and legalese.

It is a great book that makes a lot of sense. It is easy-to-read, witty, clear, and concise. The author practices what he preaches. As the title says, it is a book that should be read by every English-speaking Indian. It is full of good advice about how to write English in simple, easy-to-read and easy-to-understand way.

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Roget’s International Thesaurus is a classic reference book that has helped millions all over the world to write more clearly and precisely. This is the product of more than a century and a half of continuous expansion, reorganization, and improvement. Today, this book is not only the most time-tested and bestselling thesaurus ever, but, newly revised, it is also the most up-to-date and comprehensive reflection of the English language as it is currently used.

The USP of Roget’s first edition in 1852 was the development of a brand-new principle—the arrangement of words and phrases according to their meanings. Dr. Roget’s system brings together in one place all the terms associated with a single thought or concept; it allows a wide-ranging survey of language within a book of relatively modest size, without the space-consuming repetitions that so severely limit the scope of thesauruses arranged in a dictionary format with A-Z entries. This brilliant organization makes Roget’s International Thesaurus both the most efficient word finder and a cutting-edge aid in stimulating thought, organizing ideas, and writing and speaking more clearly and effectively.

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This is a book on the craft of writing from one of the masters. It is comparable with two classics in this area–On Writing Well [1] and On Writing [2]. In the book, Gerald M. Weinberg, author of more than 40 best-selling books and 400 articles, shares his wisdom on and techniques for writing.

The book contains Weinberg’s writing methodology–The Fieldstone Method–which he practices and teaches in his writing classes and workshops. This method has helped many of his students become successful authors and writers. In the book, Weinberg draws the analogy to the stone-by-stone method of building fieldstone structures. Fieldstones are stones found in the field and usually collected for making walls, fences, and various other structures.

The book contains 20 simple and easy-to-read chapters, an excellent reference section, and an index. The chapters are peppered with real-life examples and humorous anecdotes, which make reading enjoyable. The chapters also contain many exercises that will help the readers in practicing and perfecting what they have learned.

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