Dear Mr. Ilesanmi:
Dismayed. Disappointed. That was exactly how I felt after reading your review of Mr. Mike Uzor’s book, How to Buy and Sell Shares in Nigeria, published in Financial Standard of December 20, 2004. I should have said that I was dismayed, but not disappointed. Because that was my first time of reading your “review.” For I do not know if you used to write masterpieces. Perhaps, you wrote
said “review” on your “bad” day.
In one of my published books, How to Write a Best-seller, I wrote that author that would write an error free manuscript has not been born. That includes myself.
Great writers like Miguel Cervantes who wrote Don Quixote and James Joyce author of Ulysses made mistakes. Bill Clinton’s book, My Life, is said to be short on editing. And Tom Clancy himself pays an editor $2.50 per word to proof read his works.
So, writers are susceptible to slips, errors. In that review, however, you not only betrayed a shocking ignorance of rules of English grammar but also an abysmal incompetence about how to review a book. The review reads part biographical and part lazy student’s book summary.
You don’t start a book review by devoting five long opening paragraphs in a twenty paragraph work to announce degrees and honors garnered by author. That is not first thing reader wants to know. In fact, that blaze of glory biography; that “I hail thee” guitar in hand introduction, passes you off as a paid praise singer, not a book reviewer. Not that I detest paying book reviewers to do reviews. But there must be “a method to madness” according to bard, William Shakespeare.
If your method is to first give your readers a long list of author’s degrees and awards, I think that you will be at a loss if you were to review literary greats like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and many others. Because they had no degrees.
One could see how you were desperately reaching your hand into your vocabulary bag to qualify out of this world author who “bagged his first degree”; was “founding business editor”; reported for “both local and foreign publications”; is “concretely grounded in management consulting”; has “become a renowned financial analyst / investment adviser”; is “a regular commentator on macro-economic policy matters”; and now “managing director / chief executive.” Thank heavens! I thought it wouldn’t end. Even Nobel Prize winners didn’t get that citation. Ask your brother, Professor Wole Soyinka.
A prose work should be lively, jazzy. But when I finished reading excellent biography, and went into “review,” I was confronted in every paragraph by following sins of literature: repetition (the word sub-concept was mentioned seven times); redundancies ( “According to this author on how to become a shareholder, you can either become a shareholder . . .”); ineffective sentences (“On a how to beat inflation, this author didactically illuminates that with inflation rate rising and interest rate falling under heavy government pressure on banks as we have seen over past few years, if you are earning less than inflation rate on your money, then you run risk that real value of your savings is being washed off by rising consumer prices”); disjointed paragraphs ( one long sentence per paragraph as one above); meaningless words (“didactically illuminates”); quoting a bad sentence (“For many people who are quite interested in share INVESTTING”); circumlocution (“ In addition to these 15 basic chapters, there is another section, a textual appendage of sort.”)
I was ashamed reading through those sentences. In name of muses, what do these mean? “The sub-concepts of what a share is”; “the sub-concepts of what you should know”; “this author nationally x-rays sub-concepts of possibility of risk in share-making”; “this financial analyst examines sub-concepts of basic nature of unit trusts”; “the concepts of what to consider”; “the sub-concepts of starting to invest”; “the simplicity of conceptual presentation.” You actually have a romantic attachment for that word, sub-concept.
Then toward end of “review,” you played smart by trying to correct a few grammatical errors in book. Like telling us that presently (American) should have been currently or at present (British). That was good editing—straight from 6th edition Oxford dictionary (page 919 box).
