June Books 3) The Elements of Style
3) The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
This has been on my shelf for several years, and I took it down on Monday on impulse. It was a good impulse. This is a great little book, and should be read by anyone who writes for a living or in their spare time, ie pretty much anyone reading this. The one off-putting element for us on this side of the Atlantic is that it proclaims its American credentials loudly, but most of its grammar and usage points are relevant to any English idiom, and the tips on good and clear writing style are relevant to any language.
It is also beautifully written - and one suspects that the best bits came from the pen of the author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. For instance: Writing is, for most, laborious and slow. The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, the writer must cultivate patience, working many covers to bring down one partridge.
That's from the closing chapter on style in general. But some of the illustrations of the particular are memorable too. I remember once in a previous job sending a cross note to a colleague complaining about his use of colons: I wish I had been able to quote Strunk and White's lucid explanation of the topic. And this illustration of how to construct a sentence badly will linger in my mind: New York's first commercial human-sperm bank opened Friday with semen samples from eighteen men frozen in a stainless steel tank.
As the text goes on to say, "the reader's heart goes out to those eighteen poor fellows"!
Anyway, a tremendously useful read. I hope that I follow most of its recommendations instinctively, but it never does any harm to be reminded, to sharpen the saw as it were. I would say it's actually of greater relevance to the general writer than the Economist Style Guide, though the latter is also essential in my own line of work.
Top UnSuggestion for this book: Judge and Jury, by James Patterson
This has been on my shelf for several years, and I took it down on Monday on impulse. It was a good impulse. This is a great little book, and should be read by anyone who writes for a living or in their spare time, ie pretty much anyone reading this. The one off-putting element for us on this side of the Atlantic is that it proclaims its American credentials loudly, but most of its grammar and usage points are relevant to any English idiom, and the tips on good and clear writing style are relevant to any language.
It is also beautifully written - and one suspects that the best bits came from the pen of the author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. For instance: Writing is, for most, laborious and slow. The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, the writer must cultivate patience, working many covers to bring down one partridge.
That's from the closing chapter on style in general. But some of the illustrations of the particular are memorable too. I remember once in a previous job sending a cross note to a colleague complaining about his use of colons: I wish I had been able to quote Strunk and White's lucid explanation of the topic. And this illustration of how to construct a sentence badly will linger in my mind: New York's first commercial human-sperm bank opened Friday with semen samples from eighteen men frozen in a stainless steel tank.
As the text goes on to say, "the reader's heart goes out to those eighteen poor fellows"!
Anyway, a tremendously useful read. I hope that I follow most of its recommendations instinctively, but it never does any harm to be reminded, to sharpen the saw as it were. I would say it's actually of greater relevance to the general writer than the Economist Style Guide, though the latter is also essential in my own line of work.
Top UnSuggestion for this book: Judge and Jury, by James Patterson