TMI!
Too Much Information!
November 2006 By Denny Hatch
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In the News
The Great Train RobberyAs the civil war entered its second year in 1862, it was still possible to imagine that the war would be short and relatively bloodless. But nothing that the Union or the Confederacy had accomplished during the previous year had resulted in a decisive advantage, and so soldiers and civilians on both sides began proposing imaginative schemes aimed at ending the war in a single brilliant stroke.
Russell S. Bonds’s masterly “Stealing the General” captures those early days by recounting one such scheme: a Union plot to steal a railroad locomotive deep in the South and race north, leaving destruction in its wake. The theft of the engine called the General—together with the frantic chase that ensued—is one of the most fascinating stories of the Civil War. Mr. Bonds’s compelling narrative and convincing analysis give the episode its due at last.
—J. Tracy Power, Review of “The Great Train Robbery,” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 10, 2006
When I read the first two paragraphs that appear in the In The News section of this newsletter—a screaming rave review about “The Great Train Robbery,” where a band of Union volunteers traveled incognito into the deep South and hijacked a locomotive with the intention of taking it up north—I decided then and there to order the book.
Alas, the reviewer committed one of The Three Deadly Sins of book reviewing, and talked me out of buying the book.
The good news: I saved $29.95 plus tax.
The bad news: Richard deWyngaert—proprietor of Headhouse Books, a splendid new emporium two blocks from my house—was screwed out of the sale, as were the author and the publisher.
How newspapers deal with book reviews is emblematic of why their circulation is off, why advertising is down, and why they’re becoming vestigial.
It’s an object lesson in how business people must communicate or become vestigial themselves.
The Three Deadly Sins of Book Critics:
Sin #1: Give so much information that there’s no point in buying the book. J. Tracy Power, the reviewer for The Wall Street Journal, is a minor southern literary figure, author of “Lee’s Miserables” and a historian at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Instead of writing a review of this terrific Civil War adventure, Power simply retold the plot in great detail, creating a kind of Cliffs Notes in 1,510 words. By the end of his “review,” I knew the entire story—beginning, middle and end, including the fate of the perpetrators. (Eight were hanged, eight escaped and made their way back north, and six remained in prison for the duration of the war.) Why would a reader buy this book after knowing the entire story and being robbed of any and all suspense? TMI! (Too Much Information!)
Sin #2: Covering two or three books on the same subject in the same review. This is a favorite of book editors—handing off three new titles on Islam to a reviewer, who compares them to one another and leaves the reader totally confused about which to buy. TMI!
Sin #3: Showing off. Many insecure book editors feel compelled to allow their insecure reviewers to bore the hell out of readers by spending three or more paragraphs describing all the author’s prior books before getting to the new one. The purpose of this tiresome exercise is not so much to impart information, but rather to show off the smarts and credentials of a reviewer while making the reader feel stupid. TMI!
Takeaway Points to Consider:
* Are you writing for yourself or for your reader?* Are you giving useful background and/or actionable information, or are you showing off how much you know?
* Chances are, your lead will be found somewhere in the second or third paragraph of your first draft.
* Avoid “gray walls of type.”
* “Use short words, short sentences, short paragraphs.”
—Andrew J. Byrne
* “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
—Ernest Hemingway
* “Use specifics to add power and credibility.”
—Don Hauptman
* “Copy is for the ear as well as the eye. When writing copy, pause every paragraph or so and read aloud. Do you keep stumbling over certain words or phrases? If so, it needs rewriting. Does it flow smoothly and easily? If not, rewrite. After all, if you can’t read your own stuff, who can?”
—Jack Maxson
* “Remember that your readers are as smart as you are.”
—Jim Rutz
* “It takes hard writing to make easy reading.”
—Robert Louis Steveson
* Those who can, do. Those who can’t, become critics.
Web Sites Related to Today's Edition:
A Prose Primer by Nancy Kresshttp://tinyurl.com/wuwpp
An Extraordinary Writer’s Resource: “Gabay’s Copywriters’ Compendium
http://www.gabaywords.com/
Companies Mentioned:
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