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    Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults
    Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults
    Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults
    Ebook63 pages49 minutes

    Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults

    By Ambrose Bierce and Paul Dickson

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Amusing and thought-provoking, this A-to-Z compendium outlines common oral and written gaffes. Ambrose Bierce, a celebrated literary wit, assembled his informative compilation in 1909 from many years of observations and notes. He advocates precision in language, offering alternatives to grammatical lapses and inaccurate word choices.
    Moneyed for Wealthy: "The moneyed men of New York." One might as sensibly say, "The cattled men of Texas," or, "The lobstered men of the fish market." 
    Name for Title and Name: "His name was Mr. Smith." Surely no babe was ever christened Mister. 
    Juncture means a joining, a junction; its use to signify a time, however critical, is absurd. "At this juncture the woman screamed." In reading that account of it, we scream, too. 
    Times and usages have changed considerably in the past century. Bierce's strict rules remain, however, a timeless source of interest for wordsmiths and lovers of language.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMar 5, 2012
    ISBN9780486113449
    Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults
    Author

    Ambrose Bierce

    Ambrose Bierce was an American writer, critic and war veteran. Bierce fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War, eventually rising to the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army following an 1866 expedition across the Great Plains. Bierce’s harrowing experiences during the Civil War, particularly those at the Battle of Shiloh, shaped a writing career that included editorials, novels, short stories and poetry. Among his most famous works are “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Boarded Window,” “Chickamauga,” and What I Saw of Shiloh. While on a tour of Civil-War battlefields in 1913, Bierce is believed to have joined Pancho Villa’s army before disappearing in the chaos of the Mexican Revolution.

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    Reviews for Write It Right

    3.5/5

    36 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book is funny and interesting and I learned a lot. I'm a writer and I plan to keep it on hand for reference. I love how user friendly it is--it's very easy to find words and listings and the explanations are intelligent without being dry and overly academic. There's a great wit present in both Bierce's and Freeman's writing style. I recommend it!
    • 5/5
      In his typical, straight forward, often caustic manner, Bierce lists writing faults & their corrections. An excellent book for anyone that has to string sentences together, whether they're a 'real' writer or just someone who communicates via email.
    • 3/5
      3.0 out of 5 stars Witty, Useful, and Pedantic, August 29, 2008Bierce has composed a useful guide for writers, and it it remains a good resource.However, you need to take a good deal of this with a grain of salt. Many of the decisions Bierce makes about certain words are rather questionable. The book is old, and Bierce was very much a traditionalist and a pedantic. He was resisting many trends in English that now have become defacto standards. He makes a lot of good points, but sometimes we need to go with the flow, even if certain word choices, as Bierce points out, are quite silly.This review itself is probably evidence that I haven't assimilated all of the lessons from Bierce, but I hope it causes me to think more about the words I use in the future and maybe integrate some of his advice.
    • 2/5
      I had high hopes for this book, how could one not love Bierce? - "Cynic: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." Plus as a seventy year-old man he wandered down to Mexico for the revolution and ... disappeared. I was floundering about halfway through, and realized that I was struggling with the 21st Century language maven's takes. She would write two or three paragraphs arguing against Bierce's pithy seven words, over and over. Brevity is the soul of wit. I finished the book just reading Bierce's 'rules' and enjoyed it greatly. Donate pile.
    • 2/5
      This book was really hard to get into, even harder to get through.
    • 1/5
      Write it Right is a good reference book that details common errors in written language.This is a pretty dry book, probably best used as a reference when specific writing questions arise.In the classroom, this book would be a good reference tool for consultation during writer's workshop. It may also provide ideas for mini-lessons to caution young writers about common errors and practice avoiding them.
    • 3/5
      Bierce was a crabby old malcontent, which is one reason I'm a fan. The fun to be had from many of his black-humored stories, such as "The Bottomless Grave" proves his disdain for things like familial love. But, as he was also a journalist, his peevish ways extended to words and the way they were misused, or in many ways, the ways in which they irritated just him. Reading this book made me think that Bierce had written it with the dear hope of being called on to correct the wrongs of the English language across America. This book is not a pleasurable read, no matter how much one likes Bierce. It is a book to correct the reader of their mistaken usage of many words. The problem is that many of the words and terms aren't in use these days and so much of the time I found myself saying, "Well, nobody says that now." I wouldn't recommend it, for that reason, to someone looking for help in this area.Instead, I would recommend it to someone who said, "I really wish there was someone to harangue for my misuse of the word 'to'." Bierce is the man for that job.
    • 4/5
      What an entertaining take on a style and usage book! It's a fun book to pick up and peruse, but I also felt compelled to read the whole thing--partly because I think Bierce himself was a pretty fascinating guy and partly because of Freeman's engaging commentary on Bierce's rules. What I found most interesting was Bierce's insistence that each word or phrase in the English language should have only one meaning, and that for each intended meaning there is one word that says it best. I enjoyed this book!
    • 4/5
      It is a little intimidating writing a review for a book about proper grammer and writing! I loved this book and I did read it cover to cover! I thought it was very entertaining as well as informative. Never having studied Latin I was unaware of many of the root words covered in this book! I loved Bierce's perspickity nature as well as Jan Freemans responses to many of Beirce's decrees and rules. I would definately recommend this book to anyone who loves words or writing.
    • 4/5
      Write It Right is a great book to peruse casually. It is not something I would want to sit and read cover to cover, anymore than I would want to read a dictionary or encyclopedia cover to cover.However, it is entertaining and I found Freeman's explanations interesting and helpful. All in all a fun book.
    • 4/5
      The Americans say "peek-a-boo" and the British say "peep-bo." Who knew? Certainly, I didn't. I had never heard of "peep-bo" excepting in Giblert & Sullivan's "Mikado," where Peep-bo was a character.Jan Freeman's commentary on Ambrose Bierce's pronouncements in "Write It Right" is replete with such interesting illustrations of English language usage. I keep her book by my bedside, and I read a bit from it before going to sleep. I frequently find myself laughing out loud, which may irritate (or is it "aggravate?) my upstairs neighbors; but I don't mind if it does. It's "get even" time.Anyway, I'm sleeping much more soundly since I put Jan's book at my bedside.I sometimes find myself agreeing with Ambrose Bierce, and disagreeing with Jan Freeman's annotations: such as concerning the Proper usage of the verbs "Will or Shall". I think Bierce got it exactly right, and the Bierce way is the way I was taught and the way I use the words to this day. Jan Freeman says that Wilson Follett's 20 page excursus on the subject.... seems to have killed Americans' enthusiasm for the distinction once and for all. Well, I'm taking Bierce over Follett, and laying 2-1 odds if there are any takers. The entry itself, under "Will and Shall" in Jan's book, is an absolute howler! I'm sure I woke my neighbors up with my laughter.Jan also gives a wonderful introduction to the book, introducing Ambrose Bierce to a readership which may not be familiar with Bierce's, "The Devil's Dictionary" and his Civil War writings. He was always a favorite of mine, and I have been misquoting him forever. Bierce was occasionally wrong. For instance, he was viciously wrong about Oscar Wilde, but he was right about most things.Jan mentions that Ambrose Bierce disappeared into Mexico around 1913, but I don't think she mentions that Carlos Fuentes wrote a novel called "The Old Gringo," purportedly about Ambrose Bierce's Mexican experience. B. Traven (author of The Treasure of The Sierra Madre, and many excellent novels, especially "The Bridge in The Jungle" one of the most "unappreciated" great novels of all time,) also vanished in Mexico, but we know a bit more about Traven in Mexico than we know about Bierce's time there.. Bierce and Traven are both excellent studies in literature and in the nature of man and they should be better known and admired.Finally, there is a wonderful bibliography which directs the reader to such fine books of English usage as "Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins."I give Jan Freeman's book a strong 4 star rating, and highly recommend it for your pleasure and entertainment.
    • 3/5
      If you are really interested in the proper use of words as a writer then you may need to check out this annotated edition of Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right by Jan Freeman. There are words and phrases that I was not familiar with but quite a few that I am familiar with and found that this was a nice refresher. It was interesting to have some explanation as to why some words are not used any more or why some are better suited than others.

    Book preview

    Write It Right - Ambrose Bierce

    BLACKLIST

    Introduction to the Dover Edition

    Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults was first published in 1909. Based on the premise that good writing is clear thinking made visible, and designed to teach precision by examples in which Narrow etymons of the mere scholar and loose locutions of the ignorant are alike denied a standing, this minutely prescriptive, formal handbook of usage was an immediate sensation. It still has a following today among those who choose, even in the e-mail age, to follow very tight rules of usage and observe a lexical purity that, for instance, eschews the word dilapidate when applied to anything but a crumbling stone structure because part of the Latin root of the word is lapis (stone).

    The book is not only important as a lesson in how language usage has evolved since Ambrose Bierce’s day, but it also serves as a key to the personality and precise, caustic writing style of a man many regard as one of our finest writers. Paul Fatout wrote, in his 1951 Bierce biography, The Devil’s Lexicographer, that Write It Right is an extension of the man himself: Since he was crotchety about precision, his best prose has a chiseled austerity suited to the character of a man who could never feel close to others; the reader, while admiring exactitude, may feel that he is being kept at a distance by avoidance of the informal and earthy.

    In terms of Write It Right being a style manual, there are points here that are still altogether valid—he blacklists all modifiers for unique (there are no degrees of uniqueness), proclaims that the word literally is overused, and so forth—but there are many, many prohibitions we take for granted today as perfectly acceptable. For instance, Bierce would forbid us from saying or writing a coat of paint (coating was correct), or spending time. ‘Spend’ denotes a voluntary relinquishment, but time goes from us against our will, he notes, and he brands tantamount as an illegitimate and ludicrous word.

    Write It Right reflects, to some extent, a time in American history when the descriptive lexicography of Noah Webster was challenging the prescriptive King’s English, and writers such as Gelett Burgess and George Ade were experimenting with language in the wake of Mark Twain’s great impact as a truly American voice.

    Bierce was fiercely anti-slang. Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage cans on their way to the dumps is the line from Ambrose Bierce that H. L. Mencken quotes to set up the section on slang in his monumental The American Language, first published in 1921. That which Bierce castigates—slang, American idioms—Mencken celebrates.

    Even the notion of an American language would have offended Bierce, who displays an Anglocentric disdain for sturdy, time-tested Americanisms such as bogus, climb down, fetch, hail from, over with, likely, settle the bill, later on, and to side with—all of which are forbidden in Write It Right. He had a well-tuned ear for the American vernacular, it seems, wrote columnist Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe in 2005, but he didn’t much like what he heard.

    The battle here is precision versus clarity; purity versus vernacular. Bierce argues that if one is hit over the head by a criminal, then the blow has missed. This is precisely correct, as one could and many would still argue, but it is also a degree less clear to those who have grown up with the idiom of being hit over the head.

    A volume that should be in the vest pocket of every writer, proclaimed the original 1909 advertising copy for Write It Right (odds are that Bierce never approved the ad copy because, in the book being advertised, he opposed the word vest, preferring instead the British waistcoat ). Paul Fatout commented that Bierce was so much the purist that, even in personal letters, he enclosed in quotes those native expressions that he considered unacceptable: whole

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