I wouldn't necessarily recommend this as light reading, but it is really useful. I read this to see if it would be a good reference for my writing students, and I would suggest it for anyone needing help with their writing.

This book is not about getting the facts right, rather it is how to properly write whatever crap gets by as news. The gatekeeper is more concerned with the way you write than what you write about - that would require another book altogether!

Structured as a style course book for journalists and causal writers. Dense. Good. Makes you work hard. However, technical verbosity of the book correlates its readability and it may not be a good idea for those looking for a bullet-pointed horizontal punchline checklist.

For the professionals though, AP has a great 'Broadcast News Handbook: a manual of techniques and practices' by Brad Kalbfeld (2001) (I'm sure there are other annual versions too)

Coming back to 'DIMMC', simply put:
- write what you mean to say, using the right words in the right order.
- make it a readable piece.
- use shorter sentences
- know the meanings of words
- and try not to be 'Kafka waking up in Bleak House' (great line by Mr. Evans, which means being clueless in a jungle of legal / medical / governmental jargon/ Acts and making sense of it all)

Great lines:
- Words have consequences.

- Fog: fog online and in print, fog exhaled in tv studios whee time is anyway too short for truth. Fog in the Wall Street suites. Fog in regulating agencies that couldn’t see the signals flashing danger in shadow banking. Fog in the evasions un Flint Michigan where its citizens drank poisoned water. Fog in the ivory towers where the arbiters of academia all over the world are conned into publishing volumes of computer-generated garbage. Fog machines in Madison Avenue offices where marketers invent dictionaries of fluff so that a swimming cap is sold as a ‘hair management system.’ Fog in pressure groups that camouflage their real purpose with euphemism; fog from vested interests aping the language of science to muddy the truth about climate change. Fog in the Affordable Care Act and in reporting so twisted at birth it might have been called the Affordable Scare Act. Fog in the U.S. Supreme Court, where five judges in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commissions (2010) sanctified secret bribery as freedom of speech. But never come there fog too thick, never come there mud and mire too deep, never come there bureaucratic waffle so gross as to withstand the clean invigorating wind of a sound English sentence.

- George Orwell, in Politics and the English Language (1946): ‘Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to anarchist - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

- Ben Bradlee: ‘MEGO’: my eyes glaze over

- Cynthia Ozick: that TNR magazine might be turned into a click-bait factory (‘digital piddle’)

- Marshall McLuhan: ‘the medium is the message.’

- (on twitter:) the guillotine falling at 140 characters concentrates the writer’s mind.

- I readily concede the value of Twitter as an alarm clock for news - opinion flashes, the swift formation of coalitions and the instant exposure of absurdity.

- I discovered early on how skilled are some people in politics and business in using words not for communicating ideas but for concealing them.

- I am not so cynical as to believe government agencies are in conspiracy against the common man. I just wished they spoke the same language as the rest of us.

- Roya Hakakian: “Muhammad Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, is the best selling poet in Iran, but also in America where he is the idol of the gay community.”
It’s a fair selection of the flatulence in much of the formal English we read - and write.

- Sir William Haley, one of my predecessors as editor of The Times, said, “There are things that are bad and false and ugly and no amount of specious casuistry will make them good or true or beautiful.”

- James Thurber’s parody of Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘the deserted village’: 'Ill fared the land, to galloping fears a prey, where gobblydegook accumulates, and words decay.'

- There is no such condition as nearly unanimous. The vote is either unanimous or not.

- ‘Forward the Light Brigade.
Someone had blunder’d;
Theirs not the make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.’

- When you follow that side path you come upon another side path, and then another, and then after the zigs and zags, and zigs, of exploring 'six subsections,' you may have discovered who you think you are - 'such individual.' As 'such individual,' you are then 'deemed' to have done something you can't remember doing in 'such' a month. You are Kafka waking up in Bleak House.

Cute sub-headings:
inflammation of the parentheses
a bracket too far
dash rash
cruelty to commas
the doughnut sentence (passive voice)

We ordered DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR? by Harold Evans who also wrote and compiled They Made America Great. In fact, we own multiple copies of that latter work and use it frequently for projects on inventors and inventions. In his newer book, Evans explains "why writing well matters" and offers helpful writing directions in chapters titled The Sentence Clinic and Every Word Counts.

In the section called Ten Shortcuts to Making Yourself Clear, he advocates the use of active voice, specificity, fewer adjectives, organization for clarity and more. Evans includes many contemporary examples and quotes. Students, especially of journalism, will benefit from reviewing these suggestions from Evans who has been an editor of The Sunday Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and numerous other publications. Personally, I would prefer a hard copy that I could annotate and fill with sticky notes, and will have that chance shortly because United States publication of DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR? is scheduled for mid-May.

My thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for an eARC copy of this book to read and review.

No.*

*To avoid being a smart-arse re:my above response to the question of the title, I will attempt to explain why the book did not resonate with me.

The author took about 14 eReader pages to explain why he was so wonderful and why a book like this needed to be written. He's trying to explain how important being concise is...by writing 14 pages of dense text, with metaphors and the like that don't fit the subject AT ALL.

I got to page 36 before I stopped reading. I don't think this book is bad, it just isn't for me at this moment and it may be too above my meager intellect. Or I'm just reading it wrong. I do that. Two stars, because while I didn't like it, I can see the necessity for a book like this and how others would enjoy it. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go curl up with my copy of Strunk and White now.