Even those of us who have not personally perused The Elements of Style, the essential little opus of American English composition by William Strunk jr. and E. B. White, will probably have encountered a set of stylistic rules smithed by the latter of its authors. And it is generally a good set of rules, and one that bears repeating to any fledgling writer. Yet, in Spunk & Bite, Arthur Plotnik unceremoniously turns White’s rules upside down.

That’s because Spunk & Bite is not for the fledgling writer. As he states in his introduction, Plotnik expects the reader to already know the ropes. He then shows him how to jump them without ending up rooted in the ground face-first, because “Bending the rules can spring writers from ruts – get them out of themselves, out of the ordinary, and into prose that comes alive, gets noticed, gets published.”

“Avoid foreign languages”, says White. “Prefer the standard to the offbeat.” But books like Nabokov’s Lolita hardly succeeded in spite of the generous peppering of French and the rich, poetic diction the protagonist indulges in. Spunk & Bite devotes chapters to onomatopoeia, adverbs, intensifiers, fragmented sentences, striking locutions of all kinds. Everything is backed up with snippets from various successful authors. What’s more, Plotnik actively uses the very constructs he’s talking about in his text, smoothly and illustratively: “Readers love surprise. They love it when a sentence heads one way and jerks another. They love the boing of a jack-in-the-box word. They adore images that trot by them like a unicorn in pajamas.” It’s a uniquely wonderful way to get the idea across.

Of course, you’re unlikely to agree with Plotnik about the usability of every piece of advice he gives, or about the greatness of every work he quotes. I’ll be the first to recoil at injecting popular culture and “Writing for New Generations” (I loathed Catcher in the Rye. Make your own conclusions). But even so, the book is a thoroughly serviceable pickax in the jewel mines of writing. You just need to be able to tell the diamonds from the waste rock.

That brings us to one last thing that must be made abundantly clear: the cute, yellow volume, sporting an inking of a black dog between the words “SPUNK & BITE: A writer’s guide to bold, contemporary style”, is a dangerous book. In the hands of the cluelessly incompetent, it takes the form of a cauldron the size of the Kepler crater, filled to the brim with hot, bubbling disaster. But nevertheless, it is a powerful book. Provided, that is, you wield it like a rapier, not like a bludgeon.