Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why writing well matters by Harold Evans

by
August 2018, no. 403

Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why writing well matters by Harold Evans

Abacus, $55 hb, 408 pp, 9781408709665

Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why writing well matters by Harold Evans

by
August 2018, no. 403

Harold Evans, the celebrated former editor of London’s The Sunday Times and ex-president of Random House USA, is angry. He fulminates against lazy journalism, against the impenetrability of government announcements, and against the pseudo-legal language of terms and conditions we are bullied into accepting during almost any online transaction these days, no matter how trivial.

Most of all, he wants to push back against the way the digital era is ‘making it easier to obliterate the English language by carpet-bombing us with the bloated extravaganzas of marketing mumbo-jumbo’. He is not so much a Don Quixote as a modern-day linguistic gumshoe, both a detective and an assayer, who confesses: ‘I don’t get mad. I enjoy finding the clues, the footloose modifier, the subject in search of conjugation with a friendly verb, the duplicitous pronoun.’ (But, hey, shouldn’t that first comma be a colon?)

Richard Walsh reviews 'Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why writing well matters' by Harold Evans

Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why writing well matters

by Harold Evans

Abacus, $55 hb, 408 pp, 9781408709665

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.