What’s active voice, and what’s passive one? These days many software designed to help you write better text will suggest you to pick the active voice instead of the passive one.Īnd that’s also something Strunk and White recommend. So if you are serious about getting the most out of this book, you should consider getting the full version. “The Elements of Style” has lots of example that I won’t always write here.
White, which why the book is commonly referred to as “Strunk & White”. He is best known for this book “The Elements of Style”, which was revised and enlarged by a former student of his, E. Always make it easy and clear for the reader to understandĪbout The Authors: William Strunk was an American professor of English language at Cornell University.Write in a chronological sequence and format in logical sequence (one paragraph: one idea, go from simpler to more complex).Remove all the words, adjectives and expressions that are not necessary (and remove most adverbs).Don’t use flowery and long sentences: they don’t make you look smart but dumber.Elementary Rules From Elements of Style:.Use Similar Form for Connected Concepts.“This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell,” Strunk wrote. He believed that just as a machine should have no unnecessary parts, writing need contain no superfluous words. White argued that Strunk had also been motivated by sympathy for the writer’s victims: “Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get the reader up on dry ground or at least to throw a rope.”Ī short rope, with luck, given Strunk’s obsession with brevity. He added, though: “Unless someone is willing to entertain notions of superiority, the English language disintegrates, just as a home disintegrates unless someone in the family sets standards of good taste, good conduct and simple justice.” “I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear,” White wrote. However (a proper way to begin a sentence?), White acknowledged that he treasured the book not only for its sharp advice but also for Strunk’s audacity in promulgating the rules in the first place, which, White figured, were originally devised as a shortcut in correcting students’ papers. At a public forum last week at the Museum of the City of New York to celebrate the 50th-anniversary edition, the writer Roger Rosenblatt admitted that he had never read “The Elements of Style” until that very morning but had been taught by people who had read it. and Murray Kempton (a comma before “and” or not?), to name a few successful writers, might have been shunted into very different careers.īut, as White remembered Strunk, “He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.”Īfter White’s essay appeared in 1957, a friend made him a gift of Strunk’s book, and, White acknowledged, that might have been the first time he saw the actual volume. Had they followed all the rules (avoid injecting fancy words, foreign languages and opinion), Thomas Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov, William F. The little book had big pretensions, which were not always appreciated by writers or even grammarians. It has not been updated to take into account modern colloquialisms (“judging from the book’s continued popularity, its advice remains as timeless as ever,” said Joseph Opiela, Pearson’s publisher of English textbooks), much less e-mail (Strunk and White probably would have agreed that e-mail should be hyphenated) or Twitter. Pearson/Longman has just published a 50th-anniversary edition. In the end it remains a “little book.” (Rule 17. He followed them with examples of commonly misused words and expressions. Strunk began with 7 rules of usage (White would add 4) and 11 principles of composition. “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers,” Dorothy Parker once wrote, “the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style.’ The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
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