Write More Good: An Absolutely Phony Guide by The Bureau Chiefs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I got this book as a birthday present this year. I don't think I would've bought it for myself, even if I do find the FakeAPStylebook twitter feed humorous. It was a good choice for a gift, though; I enjoyed it.
The book is far more than a compilation of funny tweets, though I did recognize several tweets within the text. They fleshed it out into sections by subject. The first is about news in general. The next few sections are about politics, entertainment, sex, religion, sport, technology, science, pseudoscience, the military, citing and attributing, punctuation and grammar, and media law. The book wraps up with a section on newspaper reporting through the ages.
It's all delivered in a journalistic style guide sort of tone, and you can't believe a word of it. The humor in this book relies heavily on irony, with very few laugh-out-loud lines. If you like your humor dry, you may want to consider picking this one up.
However, the book is also written with the assumption those reading it have some background in journalism. There are a lot of in-jokes, some of which sailed over my head, because I'm not a journalist. I still found the book overall entertaining and funny, but I got the feeling the book wasn't trying to appeal to non-journalists.
If you follow @FakeAPStylebook on Twitter, and you find their tweets entertaining, I would recommend you pick up this book. Also, if you write for anything that reports on the news in any kind of formal way, you'll probably find the irreverent advice humorous.
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