The Reader Over Your Shoulder

Back in print, an indispensable resource for writers of English prose from Robert Graves.First published in 1947, The Reader Over Your Shoulder remains required reading for anyone who wants to write more clearly and artfully. Editor Alan Hodge and I, Claudius author Robert Graves enjoin the writer to write as if "a crowd of his prospective readers... were looking over his shoulder," anticipating possible questions and criticism. They identify the most common blunders writers make and lay out forty-one principles-twenty-five dealing with clarity of statement, sixteen with grace of expression-while showing us how to avoid them. Their insights are as fresh and their examples as entertaining seventy years later as they address such topics as "The Use and Abuse of Official English" and "Where Is Good English to Be Found?" In print again for the first time in decades, this lost gem is sure to take its rightful place alongside The Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk and White's Elements of Style as an indispensable resource for writers of English prose.

“"The best book on writing ever published." -- Patricia T. O'Conner, from the introduction " The Reader Over Your Shoulder is subtitled A Handbook for Writers of English Prose , but it is also an inspiration for readers. I don't know any other book in which expository prose is read so seriously, carefully, helpfully. For this reason, the book is just as important as I. A. Richard's Practical Criticism , in which the attempts of Cambridge undergraduate students of English Literature reading certain passages of English verse were produced and examined. That book transformed the teaching of literature in the universities by showing that the governing assumptions about reading and interpretation were mostly wrong. If our educational systems were sound, The Reader Over Your Shoulder could have the same effect on the teaching of expository writing by showing what the reading of such prose entails. The questions Graves and Hodge ask, the objections they raise to the particular sentences exhibited, are never pedantic; they arise from a decision to take the prose seriously." --Denish Donoghue in The New York Times "To see what really expert mavens can do in applying their rule-based expertise to clearing up bad prose, get hold of a copy of The Reader Over Your Shoulder , by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge--not the modern paperback reprint, with its ruinous cuts, but the original 1943 edition, published by Macmillan [and restored in 2018 by Seven Stories Press]. It is one of the three or four books on usage that deserve a place on the same shelf with Fowler." --Mark Halpern in The Atlantic”

"The best book on writing ever published." —Patricia T. O'Conner, from the introduction

"A never-ending pragmatic pleasure." —Ralph Nader

"The Reader Over Your Shoulder is subtitled A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, but it is also an inspiration for readers. I don't know any other book in which expository prose is read so seriously, carefully, helpfully. For this reason, the book is just as important as I. A. Richard's Practical Criticism, in which the attempts of Cambridge undergraduate students of English Literature reading certain passages of English verse were produced and examined. That book transformed the teaching of literature in the universities by showing that the governing assumptions about reading and interpretation were mostly wrong. If our educational systems were sound, The Reader Over Your Shoulder could have the same effect on the teaching of expository writing by showing what the reading of such prose entails. The questions Graves and Hodge ask, the objections they raise to the particular sentences exhibited, are never pedantic; they arise from a decision to take the prose seriously." —Denis Donoghue in The New York Times

"To see what really expert mavens can do in applying their rule-based expertise to clearing up bad prose, get hold of a copy of The Reader Over Your Shoulder, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge--not the modern paperback reprint, with its ruinous cuts, but the original 1943 edition, published by Macmillan [and restored in 2018 by Seven Stories Press]. It is one of the three or four books on usage that deserve a place on the same shelf with Fowler." —Mark Halpern in The Atlantic

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, Goodbye 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.

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