RL7 - on The Elements of Style

For years I have been bouncing professionally with my two studies, Journalism and English. The first, infrequently as a contributing writer to college publications. The second, I've held as a paying job as a lab tutor at a local college. While it seems like studying the two can be complementary, both cultures promote impulses that conflict with each other. Journalism doesn't care much for the run-on sentences that were encouraged by my essayist professors. English writing is usually ordered logically around a thesis and not a nut graf. Given that, I've done my best to keep the two worlds in harmony.

One of my biggest concerns as a tutor were the books that were assigned to students at the lowest levels of English literacy. Students who have been out of the loop as far as the rules of grammar were usually assaulted with metalanguage and theory which discouraged most students from having a love of language. For them I wished I knew William Strunk and E.B. White's The Elements of Style.

Honestly this is the Rosetta Stone I've been looking for to connect these two worlds. With good humor, the book demonstrates practical advice that can provide structure for organizing prose. In plain English, it'll empower the layman to write in plain English, giving sentences thrust and purpose. If you want to put your writing through the looking glass, I can't think of a better book. It has definitely allowed me to put my own biases into scrutiny.

My favorite advice comes from E.B. White's An Approach to Style which immediately calls into question many biases of mine. It has articulated to me the very nature of clean prose. Think with nouns and verbs instead of adverbs and adjectives. Speak in active voice (learning what active voice is would be empowering to the average writer). It has highlighted problems within my speech and writing, like my abuse of modifiers like "pretty much", "suppose", "I think". After giving it a long thought, I've realized that I depended on these modifiers to act as a way to regulate my assertiveness into the realm of self-deprication.

What affects me most about An Approach to Style is becoming aware of the inherent poetry to style and cadence. It may not be immediately clear to some as to why certain things sound better than others, but one realizes that good writing requires conducting the kinetic energy of a sentence. For instance, if you want to provide strength to a point that you want to highlight, say it at the end. See what I did there?

I can only think of those students who were trying to grasp basic English writing again for the first time in ten or twenty years. For them, The Elements of Style is the book I would recommend to provide a head start, leaving the student eager to put these elements into practice. For the writer, this is the book that you need to wear on your sleeve.