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This bestselling handbook will highlight your bad writing habits and sharpen your style – for clearer, crisper sentences and punchier prose.

This bestselling handbook will highlight your bad writing habits and sharpen your style - for clearer, crisper sentences and punchier prose. Is your writing flabby or fit? If your sentences are weighed down with passives and prepositions, be-verbs and waste words, The Writer's Diet is for you. This book will help you energise your writing and strip unnecessary padding from your prose. The Writer's Diet offers a short, sharp introduction to great writing. Through the online test at www.writersdiet.com and the analysis and examples in this book, Helen Sword teaches writers of all kinds - students to teachers, lawyers to librarians - how to transform flabby sentences into active, energetic prose. The book and the website enable writers to diagnose their writing for flab - passives and prepositions, weak verbs and waste words - and energise their work by stripping away unnecessary padding. The rules of good writing are deceptively simple but this book helps writers to see those principles at work, through examples by stylish authors from Charles Dickens to John McPhee. 

First published in 2007, The Writer's Diet became a bestselling handbook and now returns refreshed alongside a new version of www.writersdiet.com. The book will highlight your bad habits and sharpen your style - for clearer, crisper sentences filled with words that count.

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Reviews

Any writer fighting flabby prose should consult Helen Sword, the linguistic equivalent of a boot-camp instructor…Freshly reprinted, The Writer’s Diet (AUP, RRP: $24:99) is a wee slip of a thing, a volume so slim as to be almost anorexic, but its 88 pages contain much wisdom. - Grant Smithies, Otago Daily Times

For all writers, whatever their goals this book will be of immense help. — Graeme Barrow, Fairfax regional