Here is a short excerpt from my new book aimed at helping students negotiate the difficult passage from high school to college. If after reading it you would like a copy for review, you will find contact information below.

Yours sincerely,

Philip Yaffe
Editor-in-Chief, UCLA Daily Bruin (1964-65)
The Wall Street Journal

During my senior year, I tutored writing to make a bit of much-needed cash. I remember one case in particular. A girl came to me with a note from a professor: “Young lady, I advise you either to drop my class immediately or prepare to fail it.” Obviously she was bright enough; after all she was a student at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). So where was the problem?

I read a couple of her essays that had gotten such poor marks. There was no question that she had a lot of interesting things to say. Equally, there was no question that she was saying them badly.

It very quickly became apparent where the problem lay. She simply was not fully using one of the fundamental principles of good writing, because she thought that consistently applying it was just too much trouble. It took a couple of sessions to convince her that it wasn’t too much trouble — in fact it was crucial. Her writing immediately began to improve. At the end of the term, not only didn’t she fail the class, she had pulled her grade all the way up from a certain “F” to a gratifying “B”.

This was not an isolated case. When students were having writing difficulties, it was generally because they were: 1) unfamiliar with a fundamental principle, 2) inconsistently applying it, 3) improperly applying it, or 4) not applying it at all.

I am not saying that to be a good writer, you should first study journalism. However, because it was the antithesis of the poor writing I had been doing previously, journalism gave me a flying start. Over the past four decades I think I have added some insights into good writing that I didn’t learn from journalism. Or at least I have made explicit certain key ideas which previously were implicit, and therefore poorly applied.

The title of the book is The Gettysburg Approach to Writing & Speaking like a Professional. To request a review copy, please contact me at: phil.yaffe@yahoo.com,phil.yaffe@gmail.com.

The writing books I STRONGLY advise would-be buyers to avoid are the ones written by literary agents. Invariably these are about the publishing industry and how to find representation, and they’re supposed to offer you “inside” information so when you query them, you’ll have a leg up. Over the years I have read maybe a dozen of these, and I filed away their names for the day when I had a salable novel in the category they represented.

The novel is good; it’s been critiqued and endorsed by a National Bestselling author, and it’s been read and praised by agents in prestigious firms including Curtis Brown and William Morris. So, imagine my surprise when I queried the agents whose books I read, and for whom I knew the book was appropriate, and the reasons they gave me for turning me down completely contradicted everything they wrote in their books.

What I discovered (sadly) is this: what these agents say in their books and what they really believe are NOT the same. And the worst part of it is, a few of them seem to make the majority of their income from sales of their own books and workshops they offer, based on those books. I’m not going to name names, but they’re out there, so beware.

Now when I look for an agent, if I discover they’ve written a book about agenting or writing or publishing, I don’t even bother querying them. It may be a fallacy to think so, but I have to wonder how good an agent is at their job if they have the time (and the interest) to write books. Shouldn’t they be out SELLING?

As the Romans said: CAVEAT EMPTOR.

Thanks for reading!