This is the first of perhaps three short book reviews. 

Certain basics of writing I go over with almost every student. Organization, content, paragraphs and sentences. Roy Peter Clark's Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer covers most of the them. Clark is an entertaining writer and this is a highly enjoyable read. It's worth reading as literature, even if you aren't in the market for improving your writing. This is highly recommended for beginning professional writers. That includes beginning statisticians like my students and continuing statisticians like myself. 

There are four major parts: Nuts and Bolts, Special Effects, Blueprints, and Useful Habits. Each part contains from 10 to 16 short chapters each presenting a different 'Tool'. As I read, my head kept nodding up-down, yes-yes, uh-huh, yep, told so-and-so that at our last meeting, made those comments yesterday to such and such. Roy Peter Clark presents the tools more succinctly, colorfully and intelligently than I can. He's got more tools than I have and they are ordered, cataloged and polished; I learned a lot!

One strength is that he presents his advice as tools, not as rules. Rules suggest hard and fast brook no prisoners strict laws. A tool is adaptable to many different situations. A tool helps, rules restrict. 

Nuts and Bolts gives expert guidance on writing strong sentences. Less is he explaining common mistakes and more on how to avoid the mistakes in the first place. This is material I spend a lot of time on with my students. Begin sentences with subjects and verbs (Tool 1); place strong words at the beginning and at the end (Tool 2); strong verbs create action, save words (Tool 3). Those are the title, subtitle, and part of the subtitle for the first three tools. Clark crystallizes rules I didn't realize I knew, and adds to the tools I have for writing and for advising students. Clark explains when to use passive voice -- virtually every student starts writing too much passive voice. Some students were taught to use passive in scientific writing (didn't that advice die decades ago?). Students write in passive voice when they are unsure of what they write; they try to distance themselves from what they have written. 

Fear not the long sentence (Tool 7) is advice I usually can't use, but set the pace with sentence length (Tool 18) prefer the simple over the technical (Tool 11), in short works don't waste a syllable (Tool 37) are very appropriate for scientific writing. Prefer the simple over the technical has the subhead: Use shorter words, sentences and paragraphs at points of complexity. This is great general advice as well as great specific advice for any given sentence as technical writing is almost always quite complex. Get the name of the dog (Tool 14) is about supplying informative details -- something that virtually all students do not understand until taught. That model you just presented: tell us what it does, how it works (data in, inferences out, but how?), and why it is needed (What's so great about it?)! 

Other tools would never have occurred to me, but are quite valuable. Save string (Tool 44) talks about saving up little ideas, thoughts and data until you have enough for a paper. I've been doing that, sometimes for decades, but didn't have a name for the behavior or a way to even think about the behavior. Some tools I should engage in but haven't: Recruit your own support group (Tool 47) I should do more of, while (Tool 41) turn procrastination into rehearsal, is my excuse for every delay. Some tools are better for fiction and newspaper writing, but they're fun to read and think about and may be utile even in scientific writing. Tool 26, use dialogue as a form of action talks about how the eye is drawn to short sentences with lots of white space -- advice I promptly used in advising someone preparing presentation slides. 

Tune your voice (Tool 23) I took to heart as advice to me about advising my students: let my students find their own voice. Similarly, limit self-criticism in early drafts (Tool 48) is vital for getting the meat of a project on paper before tightening up language and organizing the content. Too much criticism to early and the creative brain shuts down and that segues into my next review. 

I strongly recommend Peter Roy Clark's Writing Tools, 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer to every graduate student and to any professor who wishes to improve their writing.