I read this book a few pages at a time over a couple of months. It is rich with examples – literally thousands of sentences from acclaimed and not so-acclaimed writers are examined.

Tufte’s observations and analysis are excellent, but for someone like me, who hasn’t diagrammed a sentence in decades, sometimes hard to fully grasp. For me it was a little like reading something in French, I understood the words, but the meaning was occasionally elusive and required me to go back and look at what she said after I studied the examples.

That’s not a defect of the book. This is a challenging book for someone who is not strong in grammar terms, but that shouldn’t dissuade someone from reading it. For me it was the worth the challenge. And I’m going to read it again.
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This book is titillating, if you're the kind of person who's titillated by whole chapters on short sentences and parallelism. IF YOU ARE, I might also recommend Edward Tufte's book on diagrams, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". IF YOU ARE NOT, well, who would blame you. ( )