4 ms·

It's regrettable that he ends with praise for Strunk and White. There probably is such a thing as "good writing", but The Elements of Style does little to direc

• GCA10 10y ago
  Elements of Style hasn't always aged well, and Pullum's objections all touch on valid points. But I'll rally to EoS's defense in two crucial areas: 1. Strunk & White got it right when they declared: "Good writing is done with verbs and nouns; bad writing is done with adjectives." That is timeless advice. It's inevitable, in our first drafts, that we sketch out our ideas with flabby verbs and then rely on gaudy adjectives to convey energy and conviction. Find the right verb -- usually in the course of editing our own work -- and both problems fix themselves. Overwrought adjectives vanish; better verbs command the show. 2. Omit needless words. This is wiser advice than it seems. If we write first drafts in conversational English -- or corporate English -- we're likely to pad out our sentences with many empty words. Conversational English pelts our writing with "very," "that," "really," "literally," "in order to" and so on. Corporate English loads us up with "systems," "process," "viable," and so on. If we tried to be as concise as possible in our first drafts, we'd spend all day working on two sentences. Write fast, in whatever dialect of English comes most naturally. Get a first version visible in some kind of form. Then take time to fix it.