The Reader Over Your Shoulder

First published in 1947, The Reader Over Your Shoulder remains required reading for anyone who wants to write more clearly and artfully. Here editor Alan Hodge and author Robert Graves tells the reader to write as if ‘a crowd of prospective readers were looking over their shoulder’, anticipating possible questions and criticisms. They identifies the most common blunders writers make and lay out 41 principles showing how to avoid them. Their insights are as fresh as they were 70 years ago, and indispensable to writers of English prose.

Author Biography

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was a preeminent English poet, novelist, critic, translator, and scholar of classical mythology. He served in World War I—an experience recounted in his 1929 autobiography, Good-Bye to All That—and later became the first professor of English literature at the University of Cairo. Best remembered today for his acclaimed historical novels about the Roman emperor Claudius, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, his other books include The White Goddess, The Hebrew Myths, and Collected Poems.Alan Hodge (1915-1979) was a historian and editor. In addition to The Reader Over Your Shoulder, he collaborated with Graves on Work in Hand, a poetry collection, and The Long Week-End, a social history of Britain during the First and Second World War. Patricia T. O’Conner, a former staff editor at The New York Times Book Review, is the author of five books on language, most recently Origins of the Specious, written with her husband, Stewart Kellerman. Her first book, Woe Is I, has half a million copies in print and will soon appear in a fourth edition. She and Mr. Kellerman blog about the English language at http: //www.grammarphobia.com.