I'll let you know if I think it's worth buying once I've read through it. Typically I expect this kind of stuff to be so quantitative and social science-based as to not be useful for literary study. But I am hopeful that it will be worth my money, even if it will not revise my essay for me. (Oooh, maybe someone has programmed a robot to do that for me! I'll go look on the Roomba hack forums.)
Even if it's not helpful I hope it will inspire me to revise a little harder for a while; you know, kinda like how you can always keep to a new diet system for the first few weeks of novelty. The nice thing about writing projects is if you get bored with the system and fall off the wagon you won't be endangering your health with yo-yo dieting, and you will actually have a chunk written afterwards, whereas you don't keep any of your dieting efforts if you put the weight back on.
I also have all of Boice's books on academic productivity and the Germano books on revising your dissertation into a book if anyone is interested in me doing other writing and academic productivity book reviews. I just returned a bunch of books on writing and writing journals to the library, finding them not very helpful. See, it's kinda like my hobby! A weird, sick, messed-up hobby, to be sure. But what interests of mine aren't?
2 comments:
Oooohhhh - I like the idea of reviews on writing books - I have a bit of an obsession with them myself. I think it's like living vicariously - I read them and imagine myself as one of these super productive writers.
Have you read The Clockwork Muse? That one's pretty obsessive!
Reviews sound excellent. I like to check out the writing books, but somehow always end up procrastinating on reading them as well.
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