Book review: The Elements of Style

That the is very powerful. I've already read and reviewed Elements of Style, but this is a different beast entirely.

This is the style guide Bible, if you will. The Chicago Manual of Style is in its 16th edition and is 1,026 pages long - or, about three inches thick. Strunk and White's [1] style guide is a mere 92 pages, and and that includes the introduction and index.

As White informs (or warns) us in the intro, this book is blunt and brief. Sentences are declarative, and there's nary a may or might or should to be seen. This, I expected. What I did not expect was for dangling participles and split infinitives to be exonerated.For all that Strunk and White is held up as a bastion of good writing / example of extreme prescriptivism, it admits that it's sometimes best to let a participle dangle and an infinitive be split.[2]

The Elements of Style frequently reads more like a guide to life than just a guide to writing. Strunk's admonishments seem equally able to deter young people from folly as to help them write tighter essays. Take, for instance, "[D]o not worry about being an imitator; take pains instead to admire what is good." Or perhaps this pronouncement against pompousness: "Some writers, however, from sheer exuberance or a desire to show off, sprinkle their work liberally with foreign expressions, with no regard for the reader's comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English." That is, write plainly and clearly. Express what you mean, and no more.

Some of it is outdated. As a teacher once pointed out, their battle with sentence-initial hopefully has been well and truly lost. But one's desire to write within the accepted norms remains, even as those norms shift - and this book remains a standard. It taught me such useful things as what the heck verb number goes with none [3], and that disinterested is not the same as uninterested. But most importantly, it taught me that it's okay to have an opinion and stick to it - and that it's better to be wrong and loud than wrong and timid: "Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?"

xo,
Devo

[1] E.B. White. Yes, the same one who wrote Charlotte's Web. There's actually a strange little trend (and by "little," I mean two, to my knowledge) of children's stories' authors also doing language or linguistic work. Jacob Grimm, of Brothers fame, is the one behind Grimm's Law, a linguistic proof that sound change of stops in Proto-Indo-European is regular.

[2] I ranted at the SO last night about the silliness of holding all languages to the standard of Latin. "You can't split a Latin infinitive," I raged, "because it literally can't be split! It's one word! But in English, it's two words, and perfectly capable of being split!"

[3] His example of None of us is perfect and none of us are perfect both sound okay to me, though I lean towards the plural. Apparently though, this is wrong, and the correct form is the singular - the logic being that it is a contraction of "not one of us."