Ben Yagoda - How to Not Write Bad - The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem

I’d like to thank some editors who gave me the opportunity to work out some of these ideas in pieces for their publications: Heidi Landecker, Liz McMillen, and Jean Tamarin at the Chronicle of Higher Education ; Juliet Lapidos and Julia Turner at Slate ; and Whitney Dangerfield at the New York Times.

Thanks to Geoff Kloske and Laura Perciasepe at Riverhead Books for helping this book find its best self; and to Stuart Krichevsky, Shana Cohen, and their colleagues at the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency for, well, you know.

Last and best, thanks always to Gigi Simeone, Elizabeth Yagoda, and Maria Yagoda, my posse.

Ben Yagodais a journalism professor at the University of Delaware. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of ten books, including Memoir: A History; Will Rogers: A Biography; When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse; The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing; The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (coedited with Kevin Kerrane); About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made ; and All in a Lifetime: An Autobiography (with Dr. Ruth Westheimer). He contributes to the Chronicle of Higher Education ’s “Lingua Franca” blog and has written for Slate, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire , the American Scholar , and publications that start with every letter of the alphabet except J, K, Q, X , and Z. Yagoda lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Gigi Simeone.