Lisa of Troy Takes on Two Prestigious Literary HeavyweightsRound OneDing! Ding!When I was in high school, my Spanish teacher frightened me to the point where I wouldn’t speak. It was one of those situations where you internally plead, “Please don’t call on me. Please don’t call on me.” Of course, disaster struck. During one class, I got something in my eye. Tears were streaming down my face. The other students noticed and essentially crowd-surfed me up to the front of the class, explaining the s...

“It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric”, says professor Strunk. The old fart was probably referring to his students at Cornell University. The Elements of Style is indeed a dusty textbook (1918), but still widely in use today. It aims at providing a set of rules and tips on how to write properly, if not elegantly. Stephen King, in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, strongly recommends this book to any aspiring fiction writer.In truth, such rules...

Rating: 5* of five

The essential guide to HOW to write! How much better to start with a guide to achieving an effect you're looking for.

Yes. This is a very good book for anyone who wants to write anything.

Of course, you can break any rule when you are writing. But I believe that is more effective when you know the rule you are breaking, and you know why you are breaking it.

No matter if you are writing a high school book report or a novel, familiarity with these old fashioned guide to writing can be helpful.

I recommend it for any writer's reference shelf.

I still remember, and will always remember, my 11th grade English class. Before that year, English class had meant little more than vocabulary tests, book reports, and those five-paragraph (hamburger) essays. But this class was different. Our teacher was not interested in getting us to pass a standardized test; instead, she wanted to really teach us how to read and write.To my astonishment, I realized that nobody had ever done that before. I had been taught how to write a five-paragraph essay, b...

I remember, my Freshman year, sitting in the Music Building lounge waiting for my next class when Maryanne came crashing in, with an appropriate amount of chaos, announcing to all “Oh crap, I can’t find my Strunk and White.” Everyone else in the room apparently knew what she was talking about, but I sat with a blank stare. A few weeks latter my required English 101 professor insisted we hit the bookstore and buy ‘The Elements of Style.’ We were to treat it like the Holy Grail of grammar, carry i...

There must be some structure to language. We must agree on some aspects of it, and creating rules and definitions around those mutual agreements helps to foster intelligibility throughout the language.Likewise, this agreement to abide by these rules means that we can teach communication. This does not mean only in the case of children, but it certainly simplifies it for them. This also means that writers can continue to learn, to interact, and to write understandably and not wastefully.We take t...

The gold standard. No more need be said than to quote Mr. Strunk's thoughts under the headline "Omit Needless Words":"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the reader make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."And every word of Mr....

In her charming essay, "Insert a Carrot", Anne Fadiman describes a trait shared by everyone in her family - a heightened sensitivity to the flaws in other people's writing. The Fadimans all belong to that tribe whose members cannot read without simultaneously copy-editing. When dining out, they amuse each other by pointing out typos on the menu. It might seem obnoxious, but really they just can't help it. If you're blessed with the copy-editing gene you can't just switch it off. I have the same ...

This book is good for the following things: 1. Propping up a short table leg2. Lining a bird cage3. Building a fire4. Using as a coaster for cold drinksI devoted some of my grammar thesis to criticizing this book, and it was time well spent. Geoff Nunberg may have said it best: "The weird thing is to see rules like these passed down as traditional linguistic wisdom. Take that edict that you ought to say "10 persons" rather than "10 people." You can still find it in the recent editions of Strunk ...