I have fallen in love with a reference book.
That sounds a bit sick, doesn’t it? I’ve fallen in love with many books over the years: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, 1984, even The Moosewood Cookbook. Each one (and there are dozens and dozens) has a certain richness, a personality, a true soul. They are dear friends I love to revisit. But a manual? Too dry for words.
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The Elements of Style
This “little book”, The Elements of Style, has turned my head completely, however. Of course, I’d heard of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (the preceding is yet another link to this work), and although it is so small – a mere 89 pages – it always seemed intimidating. The Elements of Style was something only writers used, and those writers were undoubtedly professionals who wrote their official prose in official offices behind official office desks and got paid for their official writing.
Stunk and White was not for the likes of me.
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William Strunk
But my wish to be ever more correct – and the low price - eliminated my excuses. Even after The Elements of Style arrived I dawdled. Why open a book that promised to be dry as dust? I only needed it for a few, brief rules. Then, one day, I started glancing through it, just to see what rules it contained – and I was transported!
Just the forward is pithy, and the introduction makes me want to reread all of E. B. White’s classics again.
This, for example:
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 writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
The rules, given in (as E.B. White says) “sharp commands”, are crystalline. “Follow me!” they order, and I readily join rank, the desiring to slash all befuddlement from my writing.
I fail, of course. But that wish to make every word, every phrase tell remains – the seductive, elusive aspiration to write – to write truly, and to write well.
