The Reader Over Your Shoulder
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The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose (1943) is a style guide by the poet and novelist Robert Graves and the historian and journalist Alan Hodge. It takes the form of a study of the principles and history of writing in English, followed by a series of passages by well-known writers subjected to a critical analysis by Graves and Hodge. It was favourably reviewed on first publication, and has since received enthusiastic praise.
The book's authors, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, had been friends since they had met in Mallorca in 1935, when Hodge was still an undergraduate.[1] They collaborated on a social history of Britain between the two world wars, The Long Week-End.[2] By August 1940[3] the two were working together on what Graves called a "new book about English prose...for the general reader, and also for intelligent colleges and VI-forms".[4] Originally intended to help Graves's daughter Jenny Nicholson, it was eventually published as The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose.[5]
Its plan, which owes something to Laura Riding's 1938 work The World and Ourselves, is as follows:[3] first come chapters entitled "The Peculiar Qualities of English", "The Present Confusion of English Prose", "Where Is Good English to Be Found?", and "The Use and Abuse of Official English"; then a history of English prose, quoting many examples; then chapters on "The Principles of Clear Statement" and "The Graces of Prose"; finally, taking up the greater part of the book, the authors present under the title "Examinations and Fair Copies" fifty-four stylistically aberrant passages by well-known writers, analyze their faults, and rewrite them in better English. This last section, according to the Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue, "accounted for much of the fame and nearly all of the delight that the book has given its readers".[6] Getting copyright waivers from each of the 54 writers made demands on the co-authors' time, and since this section was, in Graves's words, "dynamite under so many chairs", also on their diplomacy.[7]
Their private nickname for the book was A Short Cut to Unpopularity.[8] The publishers Faber and Faber initially accepted the book while it was still in progress, but later took fright and dropped it;[9] it was finally published in May 1943 by Jonathan Cape. There have been several later editions, some at full length and some drastically abridged.[10][11]