Style & Substance

English profs cry themselves to sleep. Faced with the daily grind of an incoming freshman class woefully unprepared to write on the college level, they struggle to also impart some sense of the majesty of the written word to students chiefly trained in the art of taking tests. Indeed, the essay portion of SAT tests is no longer required of high school students. Yet even students bent on a course of studies leading to the proverbial well-paying job must be able to communicate on a rudimentary level, in the least. How can the well-intentioned instructor teach the basics of careful writing and at the same time engage an undergraduate class unsympathetic to literature-short of force-feeding them the classics in the hope that something will stick? This manual, derived from a stylebook created for 3rd Coast, the city magazine of Austin, Texas (which twice made the finals of the National Magazine Awards), represents an economical tool for exposing students to the beauty of the written word while teaching them the fundamentals of careful writing-punctuation. Quotations from some of the great (and not-so-great) minds of the ages demonstrate correct usage, with illustrations to retain student attention. This handbook offers an easily digestible lesson in what constitutes artful prose without saddling students with the high cost of yet another textbook. Both professors of the written word and their students find themselves increasingly faced with a Sisyphean task, growing more so with each decade. Their burden will be substantially lightened by Hattersley's manual. For more than 40 years, Hattersley has been involved in writing and editing, serving as senior editor for 3rd Coast magazine, Texas Life, and Austin Weekly, and working or writing for the Village Voice, Texas Monthly Press, and the Texas Observer, among others. In addition, he has worked on college textbooks at G&S Typesetters, adding to his experience in newspapers and magazines. Having worked with stylebooks from the AP Stylebook to the Chicago Manual of Style, he saw the need for a common-sense collection of punctuation rules easily accessible to the student of writing. This manual is an effort to put together such a digest, noting wherein different types of publications may differ in their approaches.