4 ms·
> "They can help you to turn really bad prose into serviceable prose," Which is very often exactly what people are after! People who aren't deluding themselve
by darkpuma 7y ago
> "They can help you to turn really bad prose into serviceable prose,"
Which is very often exactly what people are after! People who aren't deluding themselves don't think they're going to win any Pulitzers, they just want a marginal improvement as a courtesy to others who will have to read it. If a style guide can elevate their writing to mundane levels, then it has done it's job.
- Veen 7y agoStrunk and White or Zinsser can help people to improve their writing for emails or reports at work, but both contain a lot of information that simply isn't true. As someone who writes for a living, nothing gets my goat more than a client asking me to remove the passive clauses in the 10,000-word ebook I've just written for them because they read that passives are bad in Strunk and White, or they pasted the text into Grammarly and got some squiggly lines. There are some style books that offer advice that is both useful and true. - Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker - Artful Sentences: Syntax As Style, by Virginia Tufte - Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner If people really want to know what's what where grammar is concerned, they should look at "A Student's Introduction to English Grammar" by Huddleston and Pullum. Or, even better "The Cambridge Grammar of English" by the same authors (although at 1800 pages, it's not for the faint of heart).