I don't know about all of the positive reviews that this book has gotten, because dear, sweet Jesus, it rubbed me the wrong way.

The three stars come from the fact that I agree wholeheartedly with the ideas and concepts McEntyre is putting forward. Caring for Words has its priorities straight and in all the right places.

However, I have two main criticisms (or loud gripes, depending on if you've talked to me in person about this) of this book.

One, this book is geared 100% toward people who don't need to hear what it has to say. If you pick up Caring for Words, you already probably care about words. I was assigned to read it in a 400-level English class. I care about words enough to get a bachelor's degree saying so. I just don't really care about McEntyre's words. She didn't give me a reason to care.

Two, in that same vein of "not giving me a reason to care," I also felt like she was talking down to me the vast majority of the time. Maybe it's part of her effort to make professional writing widely accessible (which was one of the only points that I disagreed with to the point of closing the book), but it just felt like she was telling everyone that she knows what she's talking about and she wanted to talk about it at me instead of with me.

(Gripe two-point-five is that she spoke so adamantly against hyperbole and used hyperbole in the same breath. Not only am I for hyperbole because I feel like people are intelligent enough to tell the difference between exaggeration and fact but also because they are fun. I didn't appreciate that too much.)

I wouldn't really recommend this book to any of my friends if they were to ask. Incoming freshmen maybe, as they're the ones who really need to hear what McEntyre has to say, but I feel like her points are wasted on people who already care for words in a culture of lies.

A number of years ago I read Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" and was disappointed. It was a fine book, one that certainly had good intentions behind it and solid advice in its pages; however, I felt that many of the lessons contained within it were ones that I'd already been taught in my English Lit classes (especially the community college class in which we were assigned William Zinnser's invaluable "On Writing Well").

I thought about "How to Read a Book" while reading Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's book. What struck me is that McEntyre was challenging and opening my thoughts up the way I'd wanted "How to Read a Book" to and how "On Writing Well" did prior. She offers a wealth of thought and suggestion for you to ponder. I read this book over the course of several months, stopping every so often to let the ideas seep in further and consider them more deeply.

It was not an easy book to read (although McEntyre does keep her writing approachable) if you're reading it as she (or Adler or Zinnser) would suggest. However, no matter how much work went in, I always felt I was gaining more than my fair share's worth. This book is work the reading, worth the effort and vital for the growth of all literate people.

Own.

I first heard of this book when Ken Myers interviewed Marilyn Chandler McEntyre for Mars Hill Audio Journal (#99). I thought it sounded interesting and added the book to my Amazon wishlist. It continued to haunt me every time I looked at the list, so I finally ordered it and am so glad I did.

I've had a particularly good year of reading this year with few bummers, and in a good year this is one of the three best books I've read.

McEntyre writes beautiful prose, which would be expected from a poet. The images, examples, and ideas she chooses and proposes are clear, apt, and intriguing. The early paragraphs on the word "felicity" are worth the price of the book.

She weaves the Christian faith in and around ideas so that the reader is awed, while thinking they ought to have made the connection themselves.

I did get bogged down in the paragraph on long sentences, where she practiced long sentences, but even there I was encouraged and my faith strengthened.

You should see how many pages I folded down in my copy. Beautiful, beautiful book.

Highly, highly recommended.

Marilyn McEntyre is an excellent writer who presents in this book a very strong case for the careful use of language during a time when so much of our culture is dumbing down our interactions and limiting our attention spans. While the book was written in 2009, what she has to say is more pertinent than ever.

The author encourages care in the use of language through 12 strategies including: love words, don't tolerate lies, read well, stay in conversation, attend to translation, and cherish silence. I would have liked using some of the ideas from this book with my English classes.

I found this a compelling read that challenged me to reread some passages to fully consider them and to stop at the end of each section too ponder and reflect. And while McEntyre gives us a great deal of food for thought, she does so with a style that kept me engrossed.

For a review that is much more thorough and wonderfully written, see the blog bobonbooks.com (Bob Trube has a page on here with the review.

McEntyre has a lot of beautiful thoughts & good points of reflection about the value of taking time to slow down and reflect and see the value and beauty of language in today's world--maybe it's telling that it took me almost two full years to finish reading this book
The actual reading experience wasn't my favorite, but it was worth it for the content

Full of valuable insights about our relationship to and use of words, as humans, artists, writers, teachers, students. I would say that it applies to everyone. You know it's a good book when you finish it and immediately want to start reading again from the beginning!

From “fake news” to “alternative facts,” we’re facing a crisis when it comes to the value and believability of words. I’m troubled by this on a number of levels. I’m troubled as a writer and editor who handles words for a living. I’m troubled as a reader and subscriber of various publications, running the gamut from news to opinion, right to left, “religious” to “secular,” high-brow to low. And, perhaps most of all, I’m troubled as a citizen, who is seeing confidence in the possibility of truthfulness vanishing from the public square before our very eyes.

A few years ago, on the recommendation of a friend who stewards words as well as anyone I know, I read Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, who with remarkable prescience seemed to anticipate the coming storm before most of us did. The book was timely then. It’s even more so now.

McEntyre calls upon us to think a little more deeply than our typical reflexive selves normally do. She invites us to slow down, take a deep breath, and honestly assess the ways we make sense of the world around us – and particularly the ways in which we decide what we believe to be “true” in any given area of life.

In one especially poignant passage, McEntyre posits a series of questions – not about the other, but about ourselves – that I think would serve us well at this pivotal cultural moment:

What are my responsibilities as a citizen?
As a person of faith?
As a consumer?
As a leader?
As a parent?
As an educator?
What am I avoiding knowing?
Why?
What point of view am I protecting?
Why?
How have I arrived at my assumptions about what sources of information to rely on?
What limits my angle of vision?
Have I tried to imagine how one might arrive at a different conclusion?
How much evidence do I need to be convinced?
What kind of persuasion works most effectively for me?
How do I accredit or challenge authority?

She goes on to conclude: “The answers to these questions are not simply personal. Some of them involve serious theological reflection on the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the state, what it means to give Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s, and whether and how to participate in the conduct of worldly affairs. If you’re Mennonite or Amish, that boundary is drawn pretty clearly. But most of us, I think, are navigating the murky middle ground marked out between not-so-separate church and state, trying to resist manipulation, seek truth, and act on it justly in the ways that remain open to us.”

Resisting manipulation. Seeking truth. Acting justly. These pursuits, it seems to me, are unassailable for those of us who are troubled by “post-truth” developments in any sector of society – not least for those of us who claim to follow the One who is “the way, the truth, and the life.”

Many reviewers here and at Amazon do not like chapter seven on loving the long sentence, but I appreciated that and all the others. This is my second reading, and I am still finding things to underline (like these comments, p. 68, 71: “Consider, for instance, how good reading involves attitudes and predispositions: consent, permission, forgiveness, relinquishment, empathy, resistance, compromise. What do you have to forgive Hemingway to get the gift that he offers? His machismo? His anti-Semitism? What do you need to consent to in order to read The Sound and the Fury on its terms? . . . to make ready to receive precisely the gift one needs in precisely this moment of reading”). Originally a series of lectures at Princeton Seminary, this is a rewarding book.