Book Review: 'Gettysburg Approach' Helps Everyone's Writing & Speaking Advance by Leaps and Bounds

Do you think that you could write (or speak) something as memorable as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address? Maybe not, but you can still learn the fundamental principles for effective writing and speaking that are based upon the 16th President’s famous speech. Drawing from the Gettysburg Address, author Philip A. Yaffe, a former writer with The Wall Street Journal and a marketing communication consultant, provides tips and techniques that are designed to help your own writing and speaking to advance by leaps and bounds.
 
The Gettysburg Approach is divided into three main sections. In “The Fundamentals of Good Writing,” Yaffe explains the difference in basic purpose and attitude between creative writing (fiction) and expository writing (non-fiction), and then identifies the key characteristics of good writing: clarity, conciseness, and density.  He also talks about following the inverted pyramid structure using the “5 Ws and H” questions. In “Oral Presentation,” he applies these same principles to public speaking to show how you can give voice to your words.  The final section consists of thirteen appendices which give numerous examples, offer various exercises, and share other bits of information that will help improve one’s writing.
 
Understanding that this book focuses on expository writing, whose main purpose is to instruct, inform, and persuade, rather than creative writing, home-schooling parents might find that this book could be a good resource upon which to build a year’s writing curriculum for their teen, especially if he or she is thinking about a business career.
 
Since this is a website devoted to reviewing books primarily for children, some parents might want to know that in one appendix, an example whose writing style is chosen “to admire and learn from” is a news item related to the demise of a couple of “gay” (homosexual) publications. Otherwise, The Gettysburg Approach will prove beneficial to anyone who wishes to write better.
 
Biographical Information
 
Philip Yaffe was born in Boston in 1942 and grew up in Los Angeles. In 1965 he graduated in mathematics from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), where he was also editor-in-chief of the Daily Bruin, the daily student newspaper.
 
Mr. Yaffe has more than 40 years of experience in journalism and marketing communication. At various points in his career, he has been a teacher of journalism, a reporter/feature writer with The Wall Street Journal, an account executive with a major international press relations agency, European marketing communication director with two major international companies, and a founding partner of a marketing communication agency in Brussels, Belgium, where he has lived since 1974.
 
He can be reached either at phil.yaffe@yahoo.com or phil.yaffe@gmail.com.