Review of “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk, Jr.
Available here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24176838M/The_Elements_of_Style
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I write every day, and I know a lot of people I talk to are writers as well, so I thought looking at an old guide about writing would be not just interesting to look at, but might give a few helpful hints, too.
Going into this I should note that some of the advice given in this book is out of date. For example, we don’t write : to-day, to-morrow, etc. Those hyphens have long since died out. It was interesting to see that, because while reading old texts I was obviously seeing hyphens in those words a lot, and I was wondering if that used to be a rule. Now I know.
On the other hand, I did still think there was a lot of useful information in here, and that it would be a good way for someone to brush up on their basics.
One of the best parts about this book was that it provides examples all over the place. That way, you can readily read an example of what the author means with an “incorrect” and a “corrected” version next to each other. At times I didn’t think the corrected version made much of a difference. At other times the corrected version sounded much sharper and stronger to me. Examples help me a lot, so seeing them laid out on the page like that worked great for me.
One particular thing I ran into early on was this example:
“He saw us coming, and unaware that we had learned of his treachery, greeted us with a smile.”
It seemed wrong to me. I would place the comma after the “and”, so that if you removed the middle part it would still read as a complete sentence. That also seems like where I would pause if I were talking out loud. I was curious, so I looked it up and found other people discussing the same thing, and saw that there are many ways to do this that would be correct. Even though I didn’t get the information from the book itself, it did encourage me to look further into it, and I learned something from that research.
There are many bits of advice in this that I’ve seen before. They’re still solid, though. Some of the ones I like the most were:
“Put statements in positive form.”
“Use definite, specific, concrete language.”
“Omit needless words.”
“Keep related words together.”
This is a pretty short book, so if you’re interested in writing I would recommend reading it. Some parts may be dated, but others give some good basic advice that can be a refresher for anyone.
Next I’ll be reading “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here’s a link if you’d like to read along!
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64317/64317-h/64317-h.htm
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