Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults was published by the Neale Publishing Company in 1909. The book is a slim guide to English usage — essentially a list of words and phrases that Bierce considered incorrect, vulgar, or illogical, each accompanied by his preferred alternative and, frequently, a caustic comment on the intelligence of those who persist in the error.
Bierce’s prescriptions are sometimes still valid (he correctly distinguishes “farther” from “further” and “less” from “fewer”), sometimes now obsolete (his objection to “donate” as a back-formation from “donation” has been rendered irrelevant by universal usage), and sometimes simply wrong (his insistence that “dilapidated” can only apply to stone buildings, because “lapis” means stone, is etymologically correct but semantically absurd — language does not obey etymology). The pleasure of the book lies not in its accuracy but in its voice: Bierce writes about usage with the same fury and precision he brought to his satire, and each entry is a small performance of exasperated intelligence.
The book belongs to a genre — the usage guide as literary entertainment — that includes Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (1959). Bierce’s contribution is distinguished by its brevity (the entire book is fewer than 80 pages) and its hostility: where Fowler is avuncular and Strunk is crisp, Bierce is contemptuous, and his contempt for bad writers extends to a contempt for the readers who tolerate them.
Collecting Write It Right
First edition (Neale Publishing, Washington, D.C., 1909): Cloth.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100