Handbook for Writers (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Handbook for Writers (2015)

saylordotorg.github.io

123 pointsbhy17 comments

This is an extremely useful compendium for those who–like me–do not consider themselves to be good with words.

It has many excellent writing tips, examples of bad grammar usage, comparisons between poor and good usage including styles, lists of misspelled words, differences between UK and US spelling and much, much more.

What makes it particularly useful as a reference is that it's organized in such a way that one can quickly look up a subject or topic whilst writing. The well organized and optimally detailed table of contents makes this possible. Just click on the relevant entry and one is linked to a well written section on said topic that can be read in isolation or as part of the complete work.

Highly recommended.

For eReaders, here is the book as an integral pdf

https://2012books.lardbucket.org/pdfs/writers-handbook.pdf

What's meant by "integral" in this context?

>integral: 2. Possessing everything essential; entire.

one PDF with everything in it as opposed to, say, one file (or webpage) per chapter

Clicking on "Licensing Information" and drilling down a few more links gets to the meat of what this is[1] (TL;DR: It's an archive of a Creative Commons licensed edition of an undergrad college text book. For those wondering who the target audience is: undergrads):

> What is this?

> First off, this is not the website for the original publisher. Instead, this is the archive of a small project by aschmitz to archive Creative Commons-licensed copies of all the books which were available online from a specific publisher at the end of 2012. (That publisher has asked to remain unnamed here. For more information, see the attribution page.)

> That publisher is a textbook publisher, focusing on (mostly entry-level) college textbooks. From their beginning until the end of 2012, they licensed all of their books under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 license, allowing anyone who so desired to copy them, give them away, or modify them, as long as they acknowledged the authors, released the copies under the same license, and didn't do so for commercial gain. This was an unusual model, but they hoped it would work. (They sold access to additional study materials, as well as copies of books that would fit well on e-readers.)

> In late 2012, they decided that the process of giving away access to their textbooks online wasn't working, and decided to switch to a different model, requiring students to pay for access to the books starting in 2013. (At least initially, these fees ware rather cheap compared to normal textbook prices, but still not free.)

> Because the books were still available under a Creative Commons license at the end of 2012, I downloaded them to have copies known to be available under a Creative Commons license. I then repackaged them so that they are available outside of the publisher's website, and can be used by anyone under the terms of their Creative Commons license.

[1]: https://2012books.lardbucket.org

Pretty easy to search for titles and find that the publisher is/was Flat World Knowledge, as many of books are now in newer editions.

Not sure which "writer" this is targeted at? Looks like those doing academic research?

There are chapters later on that focus on specific areas like: Academic/Public/Personal/Web/etc.

Can someone provide the important cliff notes?

It's the opposite, it's all those little details and an overview of what goes into writing a proper book (and other things). It is a collection of all that which you may not know when first starting out. It is not everything, but it is a good starting point

Handbook for non-fiction writers. :)

If you’re writing a novel, a lot of this doesn’t directly apply.

Really, a lot of bad fiction writing could be fixed if writers were more aware of fundamentals like these. Of course there is art that goes into writing a novel, but there's a lot of craft, too. "Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively" is a saying I had always attributed to jazz musicians, but the interweb seems to think it was the Dalai Lama who said it. Either way, it applies to almost every field I can think of.

I happen to agree. For example, the sections on grammar are directly applicable.

However, if you’re going to write fiction, you’ll need to unlearn a good half of it because you learned tools and techniques designed for a different medium.

It’s like skis vs snowshoes. Sure, there’s common stuff to them (like dressing in layers) but snowshoes don’t slide very well. :)

I think there's are a lot more crossover than that. The thing that needs to be almost universally unlearnt when switching mediums is academic writing. Writing fiction and non-fiction for a general audience, most of the same rules apply.

Of course it all depends on what you call good writing. For me the best writing to come out of the 20th century were journalists like Hemingway (and about 1% of his imitators/peers) who applied the rules of journalism to fiction and the "new journalists" who applied the techniques of novel writing to journalism (and then in Wolfe's case went back the other way).

I’m specially referring genre fiction, which isn’t quite up to the academic standards of Hemingway. :)

Dunno what genre fiction is really, but a quick search tells me it's popular or bestsellers? Which is kind of funny because that's what Hemmingway would have been back in the day - really to me the opposite of academic style. Short sentences, no fancy words, no extraneous waffle just to show you how clever he is. It's kind of ironic that he's seen as this inaccessible literary giant when pretty much the hallmark of his style is its accessibility.

Fantastic find, thanks for sharing!

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