READING UPDATE: The Bedford Handbook #1- Preface – Part II

What a difference full sentences and paragraphs make. I haven’t even been reading this book for a month yet and my page-per-day count has skyrocketed. In fact, I’ve read more pages in the last three weeks than there are in the last book I read, which took me almost two months to work through. I do sense a hunger inside me. Whether it’s a craving to tackle some meaty fiction in another few books or the long-repressed desire to write, I can’t say. What I can say is that this book hasn’t been too boring yet.

Rather than monthly reading updates like I planned, I sectioned this book off in my mind into groupings of its parts. In my mind, these clusters fit together well enough to break up my reading updates accordingly. This first update covers my thoughts on the introductory sections and the first two parts (seven chapters) of The Bedford Handbook.

Diana Hacker gets most of the credit but there are a lot of people involved in the writing, layout, and editing of this book. Boy, does she ever make sure they get thanked. The preface serves as a hybrid introduction to educators using the book for their students and thank you section. It comes in at a staggering 20 pages. This precedes a nine-page introduction for student users of the book. Then, at long last, comes the contents section. By the time you reach the first section of composition guideline content, 46 pages of roman-numeral fluff stands between you and the book’s cover. Perhaps long-winded introductory sections are standard in these kinds of academic texts but it seems like a bit much to me.

Part 1 contains four chapters covering the writing process. Perhaps it’s a sign that my middle and high school teachers did a good job, because much of these pages struck me as the kind of thing a college student should already know how to do. It’s been a long time since I thought about how to write an essay or a research paper, but the refresher didn’t reveal any secrets that I’ve been missing out on all these years. The author does make a unique distinction between revising (for effectiveness) and editing (for correctness). I don’t recall ever hearing a teacher or professor make that argument before. Then again, many of my final college papers were either really good first drafts or labors of love that I edited while writing.

Part 2 shifts gears and covers document design. Margins, headings, fonts, charts- all of these get some focus with the caveat to incorporate them based on the preferred format for the end reader (academic versus business). I snickered at the chapter covering the differences between paper and web résumé formats, a section that dates this book without question. There was also a chapter on writing website content that is of little use now. Most of Part 2, in fact, is outdated but a few nuggets of wisdom still hold true.

This has been an easy read so far. Some evenings I set out to only read a section or two but I blast through a whole chapter. I’m trying not to read too quickly though, because I want to give this book a chance to reeducate me on any good writing practices I may have forgotten after my work life shifted from word-focused to number-focused. One point in Hacker’s opening sections made me chuckle though. In her introduction for student users, she writes, “…it is unlikely that you will want to study all of the chapters in this book in detail.” She doesn’t know me very well, now does she?


Page Count: 180/928 (19.40%)
Countdown to my next update: 201 pages

NOW READING: The Bedford Handbook, Sixth Edition (2002)

After reading three reference books focused on individual words, it’s time for a change. My next book is a reference work that focuses on what to do with all those words. I think this fits my logical progression. The Bedford Handbook will serve as a refresher to a lot of writing basics, some of which I may take for granted and some of which I may have forgotten.

I picked this book up in 2002. It was a required purchase upon starting my freshman year at Lebanon Valley College. The current edition retails for around $96 but I can only imagine what the overpriced college bookstore charged for it back in the day. I recall largely ignoring this book except for the works cited guidelines.

When I went back for a second bachelor’s years later, I poked around a few of the other sections while working on papers. In some ways, I feel bad about ignoring a pricey buy. Then again, the first half of this book appears to cover a lot of writing basics that I already learned in high school. Perhaps that’s why I ignored so much of it at first. Now, I’m going to put my preconceived notions and hubris aside and actually read the whole thing.

Given the different structure of this book (sentences, paragraphs, and chapters!), I have no idea how long it will take me to read. I don’t want to read this book just to cross it off the list. I want to read it with an open mind and try to learn from it if has anything to teach me. It’s been years since I last studied grammar, so I’m sure I will get some refreshers. I just hope that I’m not breaking too many rigid rules (even though there are plenty of writing rules that can be broken).

Monthly update posts will still be the goal, but I suspect I will go a little deeper this time around. I know a few people who teach or have backgrounds in the English language arts. I may pose questions to them (and Facebook friends at large) at various times, whether it be at the end of each chapter or section of chapters. A dose of interaction may be the spice I’ve been missing all this time with Project Bookshelf.

Reading Harry Potter Will Never Be the Same Again: A Review of the Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms

Completing this book brings me to the end of a cycle of reference books focused entirely on words alone. It’s not surprising to find that the shorter the book, the more I enjoyed reading it. While the dictionary and thesaurus managed the same score in different ways, the Dictionary of Root Words and Combining Forms was its own animal and it shows in the scores.

Rating criteria refresher.

Toolbox Level 1: A-
After that introductory paragraph, this probably looks like a regression. This is the same rating that the dictionary and the thesaurus each earned in this same category. It still feels like a cop-out to hand it out yet again, but it still fits, given the limitations of a book containing mostly fragments. I only counted three errors at the most- two for spelling and one for a word root being placed out of alphabetical order.

Toolbox Level 2: A-
This score is also identical to those of the preceding two books at this level. What I like in this book is that the content of the minority of pages that can be analyzed for style lives up to the purpose the author claims. Donald J. Borror wrote this book to help people. There’s not an ounce of holier-than-thouness in the introduction and no attempt to sell this book as the best of its kind. But there are only 12 pages in the whole book with fully formed sentences to analyze. That didn’t leave me enough room to justify an A here.

Fulfillment of Purpose: A
Unlike the dictionary and thesaurus, I gave this book the highest possible marks here. Where a physical dictionary may no longer be necessary thanks to online tools, I feel this book easily justifies its existence on the shelf of any science-minded individual. It’s compact and far from cumbersome to pick up and search through. Most science terms come out of Latin and Greek, so I can’t knock it for only featuring 141 root words coming from other languages.

My one quibble still arises over one of the closing sections. I think a case could be made for putting the three-page section on formulating words from these roots at the beginning of the book. I can see how that might tempt some eager beavers to try doing so right out of the gate, but that assumes there are enough weirdos like me out there who will read a book such as this from cover to cover. In case there are enough of us odd ducks out there, I can see how the placement of the word formulation guidelines might be warranted.

Reading Experience: B
I didn’t take the same detached approach to reading this book that I adopted with the thesaurus. Perhaps that stems from positive memories from the high school biology class that forced me to buy this book. This book is almost entirely word etymology, which was one of the components I enjoyed the most about the dictionary. Words alone get boring, but some new ones may stick enough to expand your vocabulary. The structure of words, however, is pure knowledge. I won’t retain much of what I read in this book but, over time, I will come back to it when I come across fancy or odd words. That opens the door to lifelong learning. The more I read, the more I’ll turn to this book, and the more parts of it will stick in my memory.

That’s not to say that I read this entire book with equal fervor. I didn’t. Some pages were plenty boring, and this book did very little to improve my lack of interest in words of Latin and Greek origin. They monopolize the market, and overexposure and over-saturation gets boring.

The last portion of the book was also a nice refresher. After nothing but alphabetical root words, the closing section groups common combining forms together in familiar categories like colors, shapes, numbers, and body parts. I very much enjoyed seeing these clusters because it gave the book a meaningful closing. I can’t explain it much more beyond that it just felt good to finish things out that way.

Overall Score: 3.5835 out of 4 (solid B+)
This is a terrific little book. I don’t recommend reading it cover to cover like I did, but it’s a great reference if you’re curious about how certain words are built and what their components mean. It can’t replace a full dictionary but this one ages better. I learned and retained more from this book than either the dictionary or the thesaurus. As the title of this review suggests, however, I plan on pulling this bad boy out when I get to my wife’s Harry Potter books. If nothing else, it will be fun to see if J.K. Rowling actually pieced together her curses and spells correctly or if she just made stuff up on the fly.

Project Bookshelf Rating Criteria

I use four categories to rate a book. These categories are Toolbox Level 1, Toolbox Level 2, Fulfillment of Purpose, and Reading Experience. My first two categories are nicknamed Toolbox Level 1 and Toolbox Level 2 in honor of one of my favorite authors- Stephen King. His book On Writing is excellent stuff and had an impact on my outlook on my own writing skills.

Level 1 contains structural essentials like vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and mechanics. More often than not, a published work should score high here because some editor has already made sure that words are spelled correctly and that the work doesn’t fall apart grammatically or mechanically speaking. You don’t get published (or shouldn’t get published) if you don’t have a firm grasp on these things. There is still room for nitpicking word choice and sentence structure though.

Level 2 is the broad category of style. How does the author compose paragraphs, develop characters, and describe the action? How does the dialogue sound? Does the author have a competent and independent voice, or does he or she sound phony, pretentious, or objectionable in some other way? If Level 1 is like engineering (it has to be there to function), then Level 2 is akin to architecture (the little design touches that set it apart, be they necessary or not).

The third category is Fulfillment of Purpose. Does this book accomplish what it set out to do? Here creeps in a little more subjectivity. I take into account the genre of the book with Level 2 to a degree, but it becomes more relevant here.

The fourth and final category is Reading Experience. This is as subjective as it gets. Did I enjoy this book and why or why not? Think of this as the recommendation factor. A book may be well-written and an adequate example of its genre, but if it’s not my cup of tea, I’ll let you know here. Feel free to debate me on any of my four assessment areas, but this is where most disagreement will originate.

All four assessment areas receive equal standing. I award letter grades to each category and use a GPA-style grading scale (A = 4.0, A- = 3.667, etc.) to create a final score.

READING UPDATE: Word Roots and Combining Forms- Part 2- Mad – Some Common Combining Forms

February started out as a very poor month for reading. So much seemed to be going on. When I did have free time, I found myself falling asleep on the couch in the evenings, worn out from whatever taxed me during the day. I started worrying at one point that my three-month goal for reading this book would fail.

Somewhere not long after Valentine’s Day, however, a switch flipped. I tore into this book, making huge dents on the weekend. At first I was just glad to catch up to January’s pace. Then I started wondering if I might actually finish the darn thing a month early. That is exactly what happened.

After finishing the dictionary component of this book, I hit a handy guide for creating words from these roots and the rules that scientists tend to follow. That was interesting to read through, and I thought it might have been better for that to come at the beginning of the book. I’m on the fence on that issue, because I can see it working both before and after the portion that fulfills its purpose.

Despite reading at a faster pace, I still came up with a number of intriguing finds:

Narc- We’ve all seen this root before but I never bothered to look up what narcotic meant. Narc means numbness or stupor and tic means relation or belonging to. Put them together and it makes sense.

Obnoxi- While the word that comes immediately to mind now means annoying, its root is far more serious. This Latin nugget means hazardous or liable. That makes sense, considering the root word is itself composed of two roots- ob, meaning reversed or against, and noxi, meaning harmful.

Presby / Presbyt- This root is known mostly for its association with a Protestant denomination. It means old or an old person. This Greek term follows a logical path to become the name of a body of believers. The Presbyterian church is led by elders. While an elder isn’t always an old person now, they probably were back in the day.

Pristin- When you see a pristine landscape or a pristine room, you probably don’t mean old-fashioned or primitive. But that’s what this Latin root means. The word pristine comes from a Latin word, pristinus, which draws on this root word but meant former. See how we got there? Old-fashioned, leads to describing something as if it existed in a former state, which leads to our current definition.

Sceptic / Skeptic- In today’s understanding, this word has a negative tone. But rather than doubtful, the original meaning of the root means reflective or observant. So if someone calls you a skeptic, you can thank them for the compliment and leave them puzzled.

Stimul- Latin words gave me fits while reading the dictionary. Should I be surprised that they gave me fits here as well? I often questioned how Merriam-Webster determined that seemingly unrelated Latin words somehow formed the basis of words that look nothing like it. Here, I’m left to wonder how this root, meaning to goad, shifted over the centuries to its current meaning. I can see how it made the journey. It’s not a big stretch, but the connotations are so different.

Thesaur- Having read the thesaurus, I got a good laugh out of its root word. Perhaps Roget thought a little too highly of his creation, because thesaurus means gift or treasure. The thesaurus was a more enjoyable read than the dictionary, but I wouldn’t call it a gift. Then again, gift means poison in German, so maybe it is appropriate?

Torrid- This root caught my eye because I’ve seen a store by the same name in the mall. The only reason I can come up with for why they named a plus-size women’s clothing company something meaning dried up or parched, is that Torrid is a sister company to Hot Topic. Otherwise, I’m not sure it was a wise choice.

Vaccin- A cool story goes along with this one. The Latin root means of a cow. How did something as common as a shot get named after cows? A physician and scientist named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who contracted cowpox did not contract the smallpox virus. He correctly surmised that exposure to cowpox, a milder form of smallpox, made these dairy workers immune to the more aggressive human form of the virus. The scientific name of cowpox is Variolae vaccinae. Later scientists advocated for calling all inoculations be called vaccines in honor of Jenner’s work.

Non-Greek/Latin Word Roots So Far: 141

Page Count: 142/142 (100.00%)