Professor William Strunk Jr.
Some time ago I got tired of living under the tyranny of Strunk & White's Elements of Style and sent my copy packing to the secondhand store. In case you are unfamiliar with it, this tiny book is a terse manual long considered by many educators and writers as the final word in rules of word usage and the principles of writing style. So this morning I was interested when I found a link at ArtsJournal to this article by Adam Haslett. For starters, Haslett notes that the work is "spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists".
"Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for “vigour” and “toughness” in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the cold war. A time before race riots, feminism and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair." sourceDon't get me wrong. I believe we have all benefited by the good professor's dictates. I will be wary of adjectives to my dying day, although mostly because of their egregious misuse by bad poets, but I have an unabashed fondness for the well done run-on sentence. Perhaps this is because I am given to a perpetual adolescent rebellion. Nevertheless, I have no interest in novelty for its own sake. I just do not agree with Strunk's overarching rule: “Prefer the standard to the offbeat” although, as Haslett notes, Hemingway managed to successfully blend the two.
Still, a word about Strunk's famous dictum: "
Omit needless words". Of course, I too am always on the lookout for flabby writing but I also agree with Haslett's conclusion that:How far into uncharted territory can any rule book or map take me? I realize it's tacky to quote oneself but a line from one of my own poems comes to mind... "The glass breaks and I am gone." I don't know about you but, for me, that's the point.
"This rule leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem."
6 comments:
I will say that I think the rule "omit needless words" sounds a little pithy, like "start as close to the end as possible." Cute. I agree we should omit needless words, although I am real bad at doing that. The key here is, define "needless."
Maybe we should omit needless rules.
Yes. It's all about starting points. It's like the difference between a buffet and a brown bag lunch.
Well, I still own the book, and like most art, there is a net of rules that we rebels bounce from and against. We stand on their shoulders. We are the better for their corsetting of words. I say, know the rules you will break. Stringing words together as a hobby, I've certainly been grateful for at least an underpinning of symmetry. God knows, Strunk or not, bad writers will write. We, who believe we push language forward, who cling miserably to our multi-lettered babies in defense of rule-breaking, do so in obscurity. Structure gets published.
Editing is key. A lot of bad writing is good writing once cleaned up. Creating inelegance and clutter in the name of art is an unwise use of energy.
This post and its comments triggered some thinking. I just found this:
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity.
- Leo Tolstoy
Yes. It's all about starting points. It's like the difference between a buffet and a brown bag lunch.
I like the food analogy. I think I may write a dieting book, the main thrust of which will be to eat only at buffets, but to cut in line toward the end. However, I hesitate to make a comparison between bulimia and "editing."
I'm afraid this comment's gone a little off course. Let me finish my coffee.
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