How I Write

Writing is like gravity, like traffic jams, like cats. It's simple and at the same time infinitely mysterious.

Here are some books that are touchstones for me: some are gold standard references, others are examples to aspire to, and all of them shine a little light on the mysterious part.

If I coach you on a project, I'll have more recommendations!

Style

• Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric

Your mileage may vary, but to me, this book is *fun*. How fun? Farnsworth curates the range and diversity of verbal structures in the history of writing, the images and analogies, patterns, inversions and repetitions. A great vault of quotations and brain-sparkers.



• Garner's Modern English Usage

There are no *laws* of English, but if there were, The Honorable Bryan A. Garner would be on the Supreme Court.

He doesn't legislate "rules", he drafts "opinions", mind-bogglingly informed judgments about fine points of grammar. A humbling reminder of how subtle and complicated language can be! And tacit permission to break the rules when you have a good reason.

Design

• Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type
• Josef Albers, Interaction of Color

Learning about typography and graphic design is a professional goal, and for now, these two books are my bibles.

I set my default Word font to Bodoni Moda and I've never been happier. And Josef Albers' book opened my eyes, literally, to new perceptions of color.



• Starbucks Creative Design
• Gov.UK Content Design

I drink Dunkin, but I'll hand it to Starbucks: the balance and variety of fonts, colors, images and words are so well-articulated, I looked at this guide a dozen times while I designed Adjwords.com.

Gov.UK? The presentation's clean, lean, as simple as possible but not any simpler than that. "House style" carefully thought out for tone, effect, purpose, and audience reach.



• All-American Ads of the 60s

Today, the average attention span must be around one second. This coffee table book collects magazine ads from an era where the average attention spans was two seconds.

It's fun to see what mid-century advertisers appealed to in their audience, to watch image and text play off each other, and even tiny print be interesting. As someone shifting to practical writing, I've loved it.