I am quite excited, after I have finished the tome, to write about Stephen King's experiment in comedic absurdism. While "Danse Macabre" offered intriguing analyses of the horror genre, his work "On Writing" overflows with risible satire camouflaged as the "right way to write".
Mr. King has captured the embodiment of linguistic ignorance and the nonsense of prescriptive grammar by writing as if he were serious, which enhances the absurdities therein to near-Voltaire heights.
Excellent work, Mr. King, with your exposition on - your satiric exposure of - the arrogance of prescriptivists, posessing neither knowledge of linguistics nor education in the history of the English language.
If the advice in this satiric work had any validity, the subtitle might have been:
Ic þæs nowiht wat ic dysge dwelle dole hwette unrædsiþas! - S. King
... since that is, linguistically, 'Original & Correct English'.
Which...
Would have been "proper" English (right way to write); not the descendant of syntactic change and semantic drift we know as Modern English...
Insightful retrospection and mature advice on the craft of writing are found in the guidance books by a Steven, that of Steven Pressfield, not the Stephen.
