Mark Tredinnick - The Little Red Writing Book-University of New South Wales Press (2006)

and personality matter more, you might think, to the writeras-artist
than they do to the writer-as-parent or as businesswoman
or policy writer. But, in fact, voice matters whatever you write,
because writing takes place in sound. It transcribes speech, and
if it’s tone deaf, your tale, however businesslike, dies in the
telling.
This book will show you how to write tunefully. It may school
you in many moves a writer needs to make, but it will fail if it
doesn’t help you turn out writing that sounds like elegant speaking.
That’s the point of everything this book describes. For the trick to
writing better is to make your writing less like you always thought
writing had to be—to let it talk, no matter what.
Ten ways of saying the same thing well
William Strunk thought the best writing was vigorous (The
Elements of Style). Here are ten tips for writing vigorous
prose.
1 ‘The golden rule is to pick those words that convey to
the reader the meaning of the writer and to use them
and only them.’
—Ernest Gowers
2 ‘Vigorous writing is concise.A sentence should contain
no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary
sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should
have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary
parts. This requires not that the writer make all of his
sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his
subject only in outline, but that every word tell.’
—Strunk & White
14 The little red writing book