Hit 'Em Up Style

Elements of Style, that is.

I consider myself a classic Type A personality, but lately I’ve wondered if that only applies to the insignificant areas of my life. For instance, I’ll spend two hours agonizing over a font for a flier, but take a year to compose a thank you note. I can’t stand misplaced apostrophes, but have the worst time returning library books when they’re due. I must hang my towels so the tags face inward, but can’t use my trunk because it’s full of year old craft supplies.

One of my more trivial obsessions is writing and grammar and William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White are my heroes. Their classic, “The Elements of Style” is chock full of delightfully phrased advice about style, misused words and expressions, basic rules of grammar, principles of composition and more. So in the interest of good writing everywhere, I decided to share a few of my favorite quotes.

Write with Nouns and Verbs.
“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place . . . it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.” (page 71)

Avoid the Use of Qualifiers.
“Rather, very, little, pretty – these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.” (page 73)

Put Statements in Positive Form.
“Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion.” For example: “He was not very often on time” versus “He usually came late.” (page 19)

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.” Examples include “her story is a strange one” versus “her story is strange” or “owing to the fact that” versus “since.” (page 23)