Eyes Before Ease: The Unsolved Mysteries and Secret Histories of Spelling

I actually liked this better than Eats, Shoots, and Leaves--that author's snarky British tone didn't work for me, and her book's filled with mistakes. Beeson knows his subject inside and out, and if you love writing, and words, and their meaning, you'll highly enjoy this book. I've read just about every book out there like this, and Beeson has come up with some fresh, fascinating observations. His new rules for proper spelling are smart and practical. I learned quite a bit from this book, and I didn't think I would.

This is a book in the vein of Lynne Truss' "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," only about spelling rather punctuation, and written with a slightly more serious tone. "Eyes Before Ease's" main themes are why spelling matters, how spelling in the English language became so goofy (a fair amount of blame seems to fall to the French, while we can thank the Viking invasions for it having gotten a lot simpler than it might've otherwise ended up) and, finally, what you can do to try to improve your own spelling skills. "Eyes Before Ease" is particularly strong in its how-spelling-got-so-goofy section. Beason delivers an interesting and admirably brisk history of the English language, explaining how each step along the road that the English language traveled (from the Angles and Saxons through the Viking invasions and the Norman Conquest on to the modern era) has left its footprint in the way we spell words. His concluding chapters on how to improve your spelling abilities could be very useful to students, teachers, copy editors and -- perhaps most of all -- anyone considering competing in a spelling bee! The author, I think, might have make a little bit of a misstep by opening his book with a section arguing why spelling still matters, even in the age of the computer spell checker. It's definitely an argument worth making, but it seems like most of his potential readers are going to already think spelling is important -- otherwise it's unlikely they would even be picking up and starting a book devoted to the topic of spelling. So it feels rather like he's preaching to the choir. It might have been more savvy to have cast the material as "arguments you can use to convince others that spelling is important." But that's a pretty minor nit to pick about an otherwise fine book.