The Art of Persuasion: A National Review Rhetoric for Writers.

YOU can read on the dust-jacket that The Art of Persuasion "will sweep literate America," but I hope the press run exceeds the five thousand or so copies that would take. I would say I find the book glorious, except that on page 87 we are warned severely against hyperbole: yet I hesitate to use the correct word, "frisky," for fear the sober steady liberal reader will dismiss it as so much conservative joking.

The book is dead serious, or live serious, which is better. The temptation is to start right in on snippets of dandy information quite new: how many know that Abraham Lincoln, great President and founder of the Republican party, owed so much of his posthumous fame to his mastery of isocolonics?

Despite its title, the 134 pages comprise a little world of plain wisdom which, if duly attended and inwardly digested by the young (there being so little hope for the old), will raise the height of common American prose to tolerable levels and at the least will spare generations to come the colorless babble of our day. Cancer kills its millions, but dreary drear its tens of millions and nothing said.

You well know there can be no revolutions without breaking eggs. There is a slight downside, a Cromwellian wart, a cracked egg or two to be endured manfully by the reader of this guide to pleasant writing.

Rightly it points to the Scylla of dullness and the Charybdis of failed metaphors that so to speak o'erleap themselves and fall on t'other. Then (unfortunately not cited as an example of the latter) the authors speak of new verbs "hatched out of his [Shakespear's] teeming loin." Shakespeare lacked teeming lois. Heart and brains, supremely, but loins is not where his verbs came from, even metaphorically, and especially not metaphorically if one visualizes (as the authors recommend) the usual products of loins, standing, sitting, or lying.

How often does the writer fear (to get on past lois) speaking his heart and humor lest he be mocked or taken for one who trifles with solemn things. The authors insist, demand, that the writer he open, withholding nothing (except, of course, a little) for as Red Smith says in one of the star-strewn quotations in the text, writing is simple enough, you just sit down and open a vein. And the alert writer will infer (as the reader instantly spots) that unless the vein he open the healing waters will not issue.

Just here you will notice the authors go a bit far in nudging writers to "floorboard it." The language is so rich the writer should "go for it" with every resource he can think of. And surely this is sound advice up to a point. But are there not writers who have hit the gas recklessly, with results of notable infelicity?

I wish there had been a paragraph or two about the saving talisman every writer must carry about, as an albatross and an oriflamme--duty. My God, you'd think NATIONAL REVIEW of all publishers would sneak in a little sermon somewhere about What Is Owed. For much is, in exchange for the seized license to sound off that every writer begins with.

If it is not a kind of giving, then why bother? Who would suffer the brickbats of the (cruel and idiot) reader, the slurs of the great, if it were not for the occasional tide of pleasure reserved for those who suffer, suffer, for righteousness' sake? Otherwise, why fool with words, so hazardous and sweet? To tangle with whatzername's hair, or else sell Chryslers and when you fall on your butt just hand the bill to the taxpayer. The next (of many, I hope) edition of this book should tart itself up a bit with exhortations to virtue rather than "and when you publish that best seller, will you send us a note of thansk?"

We should not, however, ingeminate small reservations about floorboarding, etc., nor seem to forgive the book's sins more than those sins are, for on balance this is unquestionably the best breviary on writing that exists. Or that one has run across, which surely is the same thing. Too many such efforts are enough to curl one's teeth, and by the way I never believed E. B. Wite had anything to do with that tiresome book he is said to have worked on with Mr. Strunk. No good at all.

The Art of Persuasion, on the contrary, has so many fine things to say about speed, technical devices, bold assaults of the best sort, that I would not be without it. It is moreover the perfect size to split the pocket of a London Fog raincoat after three weeks.

To comment on a book about good writing lays the commenter open to such snidery by readers ("If the book is so hot, how come he never learned anything from it?") that only a foolish innocent writer would attempt it, and it may be no accident that NATIONAL REVIEW, with the sly cunning of all publishers, should foist the job off on a known knee-jerk liberal, thus ensuring his further discredit.

But we are taught by the book not to think such thoughts, but to ply our trade boldly, as if we were fit for it (and in America today, who the hell would know?), proceeding in an upwardly direction, as a cop would say, cautious of our zeugmas as we ascend. And looking down upon earthlings cry blessings on Bridges and Rickenbacker, authors of the work. And so reasonably priced, too.

Mr. Mitchell is a veteran columnist and editor with the Washington Post.