Microstyle: The Art of Writing a Little, by Christopher Johnson (Norton, £14.99)

Our era is apparently one of short communications, so it's unclear why linguist-cum-"verbal branding consultant" Johnson has written a big fat discursive book on how to achieve the ideal "microstyle", rather than simply tweeting it. "Big style" is old hat, he claims, yet the virtues of "microstyle"  taken here from adverts, newspaper headlines and a book called Twitter Wit - turn out to be those long valued in all careful writing: using metaphor, imagery, "telling details", and so on. It's amiably done, but there is little IA Richards or William Empson couldn't have told you.

Johnson is more illuminating on analytical linguistics (of constructions such as "There's only so slowly you can drive on the freeway"), and performs some nicely devastating readings of bad product names (Syncplicity). His ear can seem unreliable: talking about rhythm, he essays a highly implausible scansion of poor old Yeats, seemingly because he has never heard of an anapest. His closing advice to develop your own "microvoice" reminded me mainly of Steve Coogan in The Trip, desperately trying to do Rob Brydon's small man in a box.

The Banned List: A Manifesto Against Jargon and Cliché, by John Rentoul (Elliot & Thompson, £8.99)

Johnson is gently scathing of authoritarian language pundits, and this microbook would fall into his category of the "Cute Curmudgeon". Rentoul, an acolyte of Fowler and Orwell and (more pleasingly) Myles na Gopaleen, isn't against all "jargon and cliché" (how could one be?), but I would still rue the loss of his deprecated "Who knew?", "systemic", "D'oh!", and "epic fail", and have no idea what is supposed to be wrong with "in order to" or "aka".

Rentoul is excellent, though, on spying problems with political rhetoric ("Community"; "affordable housing", "social mobility"), and even-handedly nails the sloganeering of David Cameron and Ed Miliband. He does complain of "the over-use in serious writing of a young person's style of speech" a mere six lines after using "lame" to mean "bad", but that might be a joke. He has, after all, a splendid line in self-deprecating humour: "If I use formal grammar, readers tend to think that what I have said is well-informed and perceptive, even if it is the same old Blairite rubbish."

Who Said That First? The Curious Origins of Common Words and Phrases, by Max Cryer (Summersdale, £9.99)

As Rentoul points out, all clichés were once freshly minted, and this book's happy mission is to restore credit to the creative people who first said (or at least wrote down) "hit the nail on the head" (Margery Kempe, 1438), "small but perfectly formed" (Sir Alfred Duff Cooper, 1914), "I'll eat my hat" (Thomas Brydges, 1747), and so on. Cryer attributes "cried all the way to the bank" only to the Wisconsin State Journal, which thus referred in 1946 to the manager of a losing boxer; thanks to an online newspaper archive I can here report that it seems to have been the brainwave of that paper's "Man About Town", Walter Winchell. Nice one, Walter.

Cryer also unearths some surprising facts about origins: "viewer", a 1936 BBC coinage for a person watching TV, supplanted "televiewer"; and "virtual reality" was born long ago, when Antonin Artaud called the theatre "la réalité virtuelle" in 1938. Giftable (qv, perhaps, in Rentoul's next edition) miscellanies about language are hardly rare, but Cryer has worked hard and writes a pleasingly compact prose. Or, in other words that probably won't catch on: he gives good microstyle.