Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts Into Finished Work

by Steven M. Cahn

This singular book illustrates how to edit a piece of prose and enhance its clarity of thought and felicity of style. The authors first present ten principles of effective composition, and then scrutinize three extended paragraphs, suggesting with remarkable specificity how to improve them. The volume also offers challenging practice questions, as well as two finished essays, one serious and one humorous, that demonstrate how attention to sound mechanics need not result in mechanical writing. Steven M. Cahn and Victor L. Cahn help readers deploy a host of corrective strategies, such as avoiding jargon, bombast, and redundancy; varying sentence structure; paring the use of adjectives and adverbs; properly deploying phrases and clauses; and refining an argument. Here is a book for all who seek to increase their facility in written communication.

Genres: Nonfiction

104 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2013

About the author

Steven M. Cahn, Ph.D. (Philosophy, Columbia University, 1966; A.B., Columbia College, 1963), teaches academic ethics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of education at the Graduate Center and has published widely in the field of philosophy and education.

Cahn joined the Graduate Center as professor of philosophy and dean of graduate studies in 1983. He was named provost and vice president for academic affairs in 1984, remaining in that position until 1992. He previously taught at Dartmouth College, Vassar College, the University of Rochester, New York University, and the University of Vermont, where from 1973 to 1980 he headed the department of philosophy. He held executive positions with the Exxon Education Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he is longtime president of the John Dewey Foundation.

Reviews

[Samuel Kassing · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learning about the editing process has been one of the most helpful tools for improving my writing. This book makes the editing process clear.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Witty and informative; hard to go wrong with a text coauthored by a philosophy and lit prof.
I'm a cheap date, though, as I'll always praise a book with the message of "edit ya dang writings, ya schmucks!"

[Hannah Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally useful

Better for essays than fiction I would imagine, but I still found several helpful points to apply to my manuscript.

[Lacee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great simple tool kit and reference point!

[Emily Schach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Polishing your prose is a useful guide to editing written work. I liked the clear explanations that accompanied the list of writing rules and the sample problems provided. This part of the book, entitled Strategies, was the most useful for me. Part 2 provides instructions on how to edit passages, which was helpful but a little boring. The example paragraphs provided in this section were exceptionally terrible, but the authors walk you through their thought processes while editing the example paragraphs into something more readable. I think this section would be useful for someone about the embark on editing and needs of reminder of how to edit paragraphs in addition to sentences. The provided writing samples by the authors seemed unnecessary. They don't really serve any function, other than to provide an example of a well written narrative. Overall, this book has simple and useful tips for editing but could have more useful content.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good complimentary for The Element of Style. It epilogue is an autobiography of the authors; it is replete with humors. "Finally I'd receive the greatest accolade of all. I might not live to see it, but little matter. Physics would henceforth be divided into two eras: B.C. and A.C. Before Cahn (Author) and After. "

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a practical guide to improving your writing without getting pedantic about grammar. I very much appreciated the samples for practice, as well as the sample paragraphs they fixed phrase by phrase. But let's face it. The two essays at the end were a bit of puffery.