Terence Young reviews my book: Five Stars!
Most people who progress through an education system will adopt along the way a few handy tools to help them succeed. For students of English, such tools are many: Strunk on style, a dictionary of literary terms, a guide to rhetorical strategies, the OED. A recent addition to this arsenal of handy reference books is Lindsay C. Lewis’s slim volume,
This Writing Won’t Hurt a Bit. In a refreshingly humorous and whimsical series of chapters, Lewis addresses many of the pitfalls of weak writing: lack of precision, the abuse of demonstrative pronouns, redundant language and illogical constructions. She also provides sensible advice to help address the task of writing a critical essay, both for school and for such daunting challenges as the S.A.T exam. For teachers to expect adolescents to research The Chicago Manual of Style or to be familiar with such obscure aspects of composition as the case of complements that follow copula verbs is not only unrealistic, but also possibly cruel. We can, however, equip them with practical and useful resources such as Ms. Lewis’s guide to successful writing and, in doing so, make our own lives infinitely more enjoyable.
Terence Young lives in Victoria, B.C., where he teaches English and creative writing at St. Michaels University School. He is co-founder of The Claremont Review, an international literary journal for young writers. His first book of poetry, The Island in Winter (1999), was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. Since then, he has published a collection of stories, Rhymes With Useless (Raincoast, 2000), which was one of two runners-up for the annual Danuta Gleed award, a novel,After Goodlake’s, which received the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2005, and a second collection of poetry, Moving Day (Signature Editions, 2006), which was nominated for both the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and The City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for 2006. In 2008, he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence, an honour shared with fifteen other teachers from across Canada that year.