Book Review: The Writer's Diet by Helen Sword

When I was looking for a “small and slim book” to improve my writing at the library, I chanced upon this book “The Writer’s Diet” by Helen Sword.

This book will help stimulate your writing, supercharge your verbal fitness and streamline from your prose. It focus on five topics and each topic provides a simple explanation with a few training exercises at the end of each topic.

Below is the short run through of the five topics (Extracted from the book):

1. Verbal verse

• Favor strong specific, robust action verbs over weak, vague, lazy ones.
• Limit use of be-verbs (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been)
• Noun density
• Anchor abstract ideas in concrete language and images.
• Illustrate abstract concepts using real-life nominalizations (nouns that have been formed from verbs, adjectives or other nouns).

2. Noun density

• Avoid using more than three prepositional phrases in a row (e.g. “in a letter to the author of a book about birds”) unless you do so to achieve a specific rhetorical effect.
• Vary your prepositions.
• As a general rule, do not allow a noun and its accompanying verb to become separated by more than about twelve words.

3. Prepositional podge

• Avoid using more than three prepositional phrases in a row (e.g. “in a letter to the author of a book about birds”) unless you do so to achieve a specific rhetorical effect. 
• Vary your prepositions. 
• As a general rule, do not allow a noun and its accompanying verb to become separated by more than about twelve words. 

4. Ad-dictions

• Let concrete nouns and active verbs do most of your descriptive work. 
• Employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute new information to a sentence.  
• Avoid overuse pf “academic ad-words,” especially those with the following suffixes: able, ac, al, ary, ent, ful, ible, ic, ive, less, ous.

5. Waste words

• Use it and this only when you can state exactly which noun each word refers to.
• As a general rule, avoid using that more than once in a single sentence or three times in a paragraph, except to achieve a specific stylistic effect.
• Beware of sweeping generalization that begins with “There.”

After reading this book, it really helped me to “trim the fat” in my writings but I need to more training to do better.

It comes with a website www.writersdiet.com. It can accept less than 1000 words to give a rating how well the writing fares. Do try it if you have any writings you want to experiment with, even from any articles you have read.

Note: This book and website do not improve the quality of your writing!