I like that the author David Bentley Hart doesn't shy away from strong opinions. 14. Orwell’s final injunction is “Break any of these rules sooner than say any

I like that the author David Bentley Hart doesn't shy away from strong opinions. 14. Orwell’s final injunction is “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” Since, however, following his rules would produce barbarous prose roughly half the time, he ought instead to have written, “Ignore these rules, except for the one about hackneyed metaphors and the bit about jargon.” 17. In fact, if you own a copy of The Elements of Style, just destroy the damned thing. It is a pestilential presence in your library. 23. If you were told in school that Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea is a specimen of good writing, disabuse yourself of this folly. It is in fact an excruciating specimen of bad schoolboy prose, written by a man who by that point had, alas, been too often drunk, too often concussed, and too often praised.