The most famous book about how to write crisp prose from the early 20th century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style
The Elements of Style - Wikipedia
2002-05-24
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<table><caption>The Elements of Style </caption><tbody><tr><td><a href="/wiki/File:Elements_of_Style_cover.jpg"></a><p>First expanded edition (1959)</p></td></tr><tr><th>Author</th><td><div>
<ul><li><a href="/wiki/William_Strunk_Jr.">William Strunk Jr.</a> (1918/1920)</li>
<li>and <a href="/wiki/E._B._White">E. B. White</a> (1959)</li></ul>
</div></td></tr><tr><th>Illustrator</th><td><a href="/wiki/Maira_Kalman">Maira Kalman</a> (2005 only)</td></tr><tr><th>Country</th><td>United States</td></tr><tr><th>Subject</th><td>American English <a href="/wiki/Style_guide">style guide</a></td></tr><tr><th>Publisher</th><td><div>
<ul><li><a href="/wiki/Harcourt_Brace">Harcourt, Brace &amp; Howe</a> (1920)</li>
<li><a href="/wiki/Macmillan_Publishers_(United_States)">Macmillan</a> (1959)</li>
<li><a href="/wiki/Allyn_%26_Bacon">Allyn &amp; Bacon</a> (1999)</li></ul>
</div></td></tr><tr><th>Media type</th><td>Print (<a href="/wiki/Paperback">Paperback</a>)</td></tr><tr><th>Pages</th><td>43 (1918), 52 (1920),<sup><a href="#cite_note-LCC1920-1">[1]</a></sup> 71 (1959), 105 (1999)</td></tr><tr><th><a href="/wiki/OCLC_(identifier)"><abbr>OCLC</abbr></a></th><td><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27652766">27652766</a></td></tr><tr><th><div><p><a href="/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification">Dewey Decimal</a></p></div></th><td>808/.042 21</td></tr><tr><th><a href="/wiki/LCC_(identifier)"><abbr>LC Class</abbr></a></th><td>PE1421 .S7 (Strunk)<sup><a href="#cite_note-LCC1920-1">[1]</a></sup> <br />PE1408 .S772 (Strunk &amp; White)</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p><i><b>The Elements of Style</b></i> is an <a href="/wiki/American_English">American English</a> writing <a href="/wiki/Style_guide">style guide</a> in numerous editions. The original was written by <a href="/wiki/William_Strunk_Jr.">William Strunk Jr.</a> in 1918, and published by <a href="/wiki/Harcourt_(publisher)">Harcourt</a> in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled". <a href="/wiki/E._B._White">E. B. White</a> greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by <a href="/wiki/Macmillan_Publishers">Macmillan</a> in 1959. That was the first edition of the so-called <b>Strunk &amp; White</b>, which <i><a href="/wiki/Time_(magazine)">Time</a></i> named in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.<sup><a href="#cite_note-Time-2">[2]</a></sup> 
</p><p>
American poet <a href="/wiki/Dorothy_Parker">Dorothy Parker</a> said, regarding the book:</p><blockquote><p>If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of <i>The Elements of Style</i>. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.<sup><a href="#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup></p></blockquote>
<h2>History[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&amp;action=edit&amp;section=1">edit</a>]</h2>
<p><a href="/wiki/Cornell_University">Cornell University</a> <a href="/wiki/English_studies">English</a> professor William Strunk Jr. wrote <i>The Elements of Style</i> in 1918 and privately published it in 1919, for use at the university. (Harcourt republished it in 52-page format in 1920.)<sup><a href="#cite_note-LCC1920-1">[1]</a></sup> He and editor Edward A. Tenney later revised it for publication as <i>The Elements and Practice of Composition</i> (1935). In 1957 the style guide reached the attention of <a href="/wiki/E.B._White">E.B. White</a> at <i><a href="/wiki/The_New_Yorker">The New Yorker</a></i>. White had studied writing under Strunk in 1919 but had since forgotten "the little book" that he described as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English". Weeks later, White wrote about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose in his column.<sup><a href="#cite_note-white57-4">[4]</a></sup><sup><a href="#cite_note-Style,_p.xiii-5">[5]</a></sup>
</p><p><a href="/wiki/Macmillan_and_Company">Macmillan and Company</a> subsequently commissioned White to revise <i>The Elements</i> for a 1959 edition (Strunk had died in 1946). White's expansion and modernization of Strunk and Tenney's 1935 revised edition yielded the writing style manual informally known as "Strunk &amp; White", the first edition of which sold about two million copies in 1959. More than ten million copies of three editions were later sold.<sup><a href="#cite_note-6">[6]</a></sup> Mark Garvey relates the history of the book in <i>Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk &amp; White's The Elements of Style</i> (2009).<sup><a href="#cite_note-7">[7]</a></sup>
</p><p>Maira Kalman, who provided the illustrations for <i>The Elements of Style Illustrated</i> (2005, see below), asked <a href="/wiki/Nico_Muhly">Nico Muhly</a> to compose a <a href="/wiki/Cantata">cantata</a> based on the book. It was performed at the <a href="/wiki/New_York_Public_Library">New York Public Library</a> in October 2005.<sup><a href="#cite_note-8">[8]</a></sup><sup><a href="#cite_note-9">[9]</a></sup><sup><a href="#cite_note-10">[10]</a></sup>
</p><p><a href="/wiki/Audiobook">Audiobook</a> versions of <i>The Elements</i> now feature changed wording, citing "gender issues" with the original.<sup><a href="#cite_note-simply-11">[11]</a></sup>
</p>
<h2>Content[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&amp;action=edit&amp;section=2">edit</a>]</h2>
<p>Strunk concentrated on the cultivation of good writing and composition; the original 1918 edition exhorted writers to "omit needless words", use the <a href="/wiki/Active_voice">active voice</a>, and employ <a href="/wiki/Parallelism_(grammar)">parallelism</a> appropriately.<sup><a href="#cite_note-12">[12]</a></sup>
</p><p>The 1959 edition features White's expansions of preliminary sections, the "Introduction" essay (derived from his magazine story about Strunk), and the concluding chapter, "An Approach to Style", a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English. He also produced the second (1972) and third (1979) editions of <i>The Elements of Style</i>, by which time the book's length had extended to 85 pages.
</p><p>The third edition of <i>The Elements of Style</i> (1979) features 54 points: a list of common word-usage errors; 11 rules of punctuation and grammar; 11 principles of writing; 11 matters of form; and, in Chapter V, 21 reminders for better style. The final reminder, the 21st, "Prefer the standard to the offbeat", is thematically integral to the subject of <i>The Elements of Style</i>, yet does stand as a discrete essay about writing lucid prose.<sup><a href="#cite_note-Style,_p.xiii-5">[5]</a></sup> To write well, White advises writers to have the proper mind-set, that they write to please themselves, and that they aim for "one moment of felicity", a phrase by <a href="/wiki/Robert_Louis_Stevenson">Robert Louis Stevenson</a>.<sup><a href="#cite_note-13">[13]</a></sup> Thus Strunk's 1918 recommendation:
</p>
<blockquote><p>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. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell. </p><p>— <cite>"Elementary Principles of Composition", <i>The Elements of Style</i><sup><a href="#cite_note-14">[14]</a></sup></cite></p></blockquote>
<p>Strunk Jr. no longer has a comma in his name in the 1979 and later editions, due to the modernized style recommendation about punctuating such names.
</p><p>The fourth edition of <i>The Elements of Style</i> (2000), published 54 years after Strunk's death, omits his stylistic advice about masculine pronouns: "unless the antecedent is or must be feminine".<sup><a href="#cite_note-15">[15]</a></sup> In its place, the following sentence has been added: "many writers find the use of the generic <i>he</i> or <i>his</i> to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive." Further, the re-titled entry "They. He or She", in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions, advises the writer to avoid an "unintentional emphasis on the masculine".<sup><a href="#cite_note-Strunk-1999-p60-16">[16]</a></sup><sup><a href="#cite_note-17">[17]</a></sup>
</p><p>Components new to the fourth edition include a foreword by <a href="/wiki/Roger_Angell">Roger Angell</a>, stepson of E. B. White, an afterword by the American cultural commentator <a href="/wiki/Charles_Osgood">Charles Osgood</a>, a glossary, and an index. Five years later, the fourth edition text was re-published as <i>The Elements of Style Illustrated</i> (2005), with illustrations by the designer <a href="/wiki/Maira_Kalman">Maira Kalman</a>. This edition excludes the afterword by Osgood and restores the first edition chapter on spelling.
</p>
<h2>Reception[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&amp;action=edit&amp;section=3">edit</a>]</h2>
<p><i>The Elements of Style</i> was listed as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 by <i>Time</i> in its 2011 list.<sup><a href="#cite_note-Time-2">[2]</a></sup> Upon its release, Charles Poor, writing for <i><a href="/wiki/The_New_York_Times">The New York Times</a></i>, called it "a splendid trophy for all who are interested in reading and writing."<sup><a href="#cite_note-18">[18]</a></sup> 
</p><p>Criticism of <i>Strunk &amp; White</i> has largely focused on claims that it has a <a href="/wiki/Linguistic_prescriptivism">prescriptivist</a> nature, or that it has become a general <a href="/wiki/Anachronism">anachronism</a> in the face of modern English usage.
</p><p>
In criticizing <i>The Elements of Style</i>, <a href="/wiki/Geoffrey_Pullum">Geoffrey Pullum</a>, professor of <a href="/wiki/Linguistics">linguistics</a> at the <a href="/wiki/University_of_Edinburgh">University of Edinburgh</a>, and co-author of <i><a href="/wiki/The_Cambridge_Grammar_of_the_English_Language">The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language</a></i> (2002), said that: </p><blockquote><p>The book's toxic mix of <a href="/wiki/Linguistic_purism">purism</a>, <a href="/wiki/Atavism">atavism</a>, and personal <a href="/wiki/Eccentricity_(behavior)">eccentricity</a> is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules ... It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of <i>Strunk and White</i>, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write <i>however</i> or <i>than me</i> or <i>was</i> or <i>which</i>, but can't tell you why.<sup><a href="#cite_note-pullum-50years-19">[19]</a></sup></p></blockquote>
<p>Pullum has argued, for example, that the authors misunderstood what constitutes the <a href="/wiki/English_passive_voice">passive voice</a>, and he criticized their proscription of established and unproblematic English usages, such as the <a href="/wiki/Split_infinitive">split infinitive</a> and the use of <i>which</i> in a restrictive <a href="/wiki/English_relative_clause#That_or_which">relative clause</a>.<sup><a href="#cite_note-pullum-50years-19">[19]</a></sup> On <i><a href="/wiki/Language_Log">Language Log</a></i>, a blog about language written by <a href="/wiki/Linguists">linguists</a>, he further criticized <i>The Elements of Style</i> for promoting <a href="/wiki/Linguistic_prescriptivism">linguistic prescriptivism</a> and <a href="/wiki/Hypercorrection">hypercorrection</a> among <a href="/wiki/Anglophones">Anglophones</a>, and called it "the book that ate America's brain".<sup><a href="#cite_note-20">[20]</a></sup>
</p><p><i><a href="/wiki/The_Boston_Globe">The Boston Globe</a></i>'s review described <i>The Elements of Style Illustrated</i> (2005), with illustrations by Maira Kalman, as an "aging zombie of a book ... a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated <a href="/wiki/Pet_peeve">pet peeves</a> jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice".<sup><a href="#cite_note-21">[21]</a></sup>
</p><p>Nevertheless, many contemporary authors still recommend it highly. Their praise tends to focus on its characterization of good writing and how to achieve it, grammar being just one element of that purpose. In <i><a href="/wiki/On_Writing:_A_Memoir_of_the_Craft">On Writing</a></i> (2000, p. 11), <a href="/wiki/Stephen_King">Stephen King</a> writes: "There is little or no detectable <a href="/wiki/Bullshit">bullshit</a> in that book. (Of course, it's short; at eighty-five pages it's much shorter than this one.) I'll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read <i>The Elements of Style</i>. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composition is 'Omit needless words.' I will try to do that here."
</p><p>In 2011, <a href="/w/index.php?title=Tim_Skern&amp;action=edit&amp;redlink=1">Tim Skern</a> remarked that <i>The Elements of Style</i> "remains the best book available on writing good English".<sup><a href="#cite_note-22">[22]</a></sup>
</p><p>In 2013, <a href="/wiki/Nevile_Gwynne">Nevile Gwynne</a> reproduced <i>The Elements of Style</i> in his work <i><a href="/wiki/Gwynne%27s_Grammar">Gwynne's Grammar</a></i>. Britt Peterson of the <i><a href="/wiki/Boston_Globe">Boston Globe</a></i> wrote that his inclusion of the book was a "curious addition".<sup><a href="#cite_note-23">[23]</a></sup>
</p><p>In 2016, the <a href="/wiki/Open_Syllabus_Project">Open Syllabus Project</a><sup><a href="#cite_note-24">[24]</a></sup> lists <i>The Elements of Style</i> as the most frequently assigned text in US academic <a href="/wiki/Syllabus">syllabuses</a>, based on an analysis of 933,635 texts appearing in over 1 million syllabuses.<sup><a href="#cite_note-25">[25]</a></sup>
</p>
<h2>Editions[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&amp;action=edit&amp;section=4">edit</a>]</h2>
<h3>Strunk[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&amp;action=edit&amp;section=5">edit</a>]</h3>
<ul><li><i>Elements of Style</i>. Composed in 1918 and <a href="/wiki/Privately_printed">privately printed</a> in 1919. 43 pages. <a href="/wiki/OCLC_(identifier)">OCLC</a> <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/6589433">6589433</a>.</li>
<li><i>The Elements of Style</i>. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. 52-page publication of the original.<sup><a href="#cite_note-LCC1920-1">[1]</a></sup></li></ul>
<p>(Because the text of Strunk's original is now in the <a href="/wiki/Public_domain">public domain</a> and freely available on the Internet, publishers can and do reprint it in book form.)
</p>
<h3>Strunk &amp; Edward A. Tenney[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&amp;action=edit&amp;section=6">edit</a>]</h3>
<ul><li><i>The Elements and Practice of Composition</i>. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Despite the new title, an expansion of <i>(The) Elements of Style</i>; 60 pages plus 47 "practice leaves". <a href="/wiki/OCLC_(identifier)">OCLC</a> <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/781988921">781988921</a></li></ul>
<h3>Strunk &amp; White[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&amp;action=edit&amp;section=7">edit</a>]</h3>
<ul><li><i>The Elements of Style</i>. New York: Macmillan, 1959. <a href="/wiki/OCLC_(identifier)">OCLC</a> <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/878906498">878906498</a>.</li>
<li><i>The Elements of Style</i>. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1972. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/0024182605">0024182605</a>.</li>
<li><i>The Elements of Style</i>. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1979. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/0024181900">0024181900</a> (hardback), <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/0024182001">0024182001</a> (paperback).</li>
<li><i>The Elements of Style</i>. 4th ed. S.l.: Longman, 1999. Hardback. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-205-31342-6">0-205-31342-6</a> (hardback). S.l.: Longman, 2000. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-205-30902-X">0-205-30902-X</a> (paperback). With a foreword by <a href="/wiki/Roger_Angell">Roger Angell</a>.</li>
<li><i>The Elements of Style Illustrated</i>. With illustrations by <a href="/wiki/Maira_Kalman">Maira Kalman</a>. Penguin, 2005. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/1-594-20069-6">1-594-20069-6</a> (hardback). Penguin, 2005. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780910301961">9780910301961</a> (hardback). Penguin. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780143112723">9780143112723</a> (paperback). Penguin, 2008. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/9781439562635">9781439562635</a> (paperback).</li>
<li><i>The Elements of Style</i>. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-205-63264-5">0-205-63264-5</a>. Contains the 4th ed. text; with a foreword by <a href="/wiki/Charles_Osgood">Charles Osgood</a>.<sup>[<i><a href="/wiki/Wikipedia:Please_clarify">clarification needed</a></i>]</sup></li></ul>
<h2>See also[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&amp;action=edit&amp;section=8">edit</a>]</h2>
<ul><li><i><a href="/wiki/The_Complete_Plain_Words">The Complete Plain Words</a></i></li>
<li><i><a href="/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_English_Usage">A Dictionary of Modern English Usage</a></i></li>
<li><i><a href="/wiki/Style:_Lessons_in_Clarity_and_Grace">Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace</a></i></li></ul>
<p>Several books were titled paying homage to Strunk's, for example:
</p>
<ul><li><i><a href="/wiki/The_Elements_of_Programming_Style">The Elements of Programming Style</a></i></li>
<li><i><a href="/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Style">The Elements of Typographic Style</a></i></li></ul>
<h2>References[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&amp;action=edit&amp;section=9">edit</a>]</h2>
<div><ol>
<li>^ <a href="#cite_ref-LCC1920_1-0"><sup><i><b>a</b></i></sup></a> <a href="#cite_ref-LCC1920_1-1"><sup><i><b>b</b></i></sup></a> <a href="#cite_ref-LCC1920_1-2"><sup><i><b>c</b></i></sup></a> <a href="#cite_ref-LCC1920_1-3"><sup><i><b>d</b></i></sup></a> <a href="http://lccn.loc.gov/20017753">"The elements of style"</a> [copyright 1920]. <a href="/wiki/Library_of_Congress">Library of Congress</a> Catalog Record (<b>LCC</b>). Retrieved 2014-05-14.
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<li>^ <a href="#cite_ref-Time_2-0"><sup><i><b>a</b></i></sup></a> <a href="#cite_ref-Time_2-1"><sup><i><b>b</b></i></sup></a> <cite>Skarda, Erin (August 16, 2011). <a href="http://entertainment.time.com/2011/08/30/all-time-100-best-nonfiction-books/slide/elements-of-style-by-strunk-and-white">"<i>Elements of Style</i>"</a>. <i>All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books</i>. <a href="/wiki/Time,_Inc.">Time, Inc.</a> Retrieved 2014-05-14.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-3">^</a></b> <cite>Roberts, Sam (21 April 2009). <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/books/22elem.html">"'The Elements of Style' Turns 50"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/The_New_York_Times">The New York Times</a></i>. Retrieved 2015-04-10.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-white57_4-0">^</a></b> E. B. White, "Letter from the East", <i>The New Yorker</i>, July 27, 1957, <b>33</b>:23:<a href="https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1957-07-27/flipbook/035/">35–36, 41–43</a>
</li>
<li>^ <a href="#cite_ref-Style,_p.xiii_5-0"><sup><i><b>a</b></i></sup></a> <a href="#cite_ref-Style,_p.xiii_5-1"><sup><i><b>b</b></i></sup></a> <cite>Strunk, William Jr.; White, E. B. (2009). <a href="https://archive.org/details/elementsofs00stru"><i>The Elements of Style</i></a> (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. p. xiii. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-205-31342-6"><bdi>978-0-205-31342-6</bdi></a>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-6">^</a></b> Strunk and White (2009), p. x.
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-7">^</a></b> <cite>Garvey, Mark (2009). <a href="https://archive.org/details/stylizedslightly00garv"><i>Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk &amp; White's The Elements of Style</i></a>. Simon &amp; Schuster. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-4165-9092-7"><bdi>978-1-4165-9092-7</bdi></a>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-8">^</a></b> <cite>Eicher, Jeremy (October 21, 2005). <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/19/arts/style-gets-new-elements.html">"'Style' Gets New Elements"</a>. <i>The New York Times</i>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-9">^</a></b> <cite>Neary, Lynn (November 2, 2005). <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4985137">"'Elements of Style' Goes Beyond Words"</a>. <i>NPR Books</i>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-10">^</a></b> <cite><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140116124639/http://www.laco.org/composer/359">"Nico Muhly"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/Los_Angeles_Chamber_Orchestra">Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra</a></i>. Archived from <a href="http://www.laco.org/composer/359">the original</a> on 2014-01-16.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-simply_11-0">^</a></b> <cite><i>The Elements of Style: 60 Minutes to Better Writing &amp; Grammar (Unabridged Audiobook)</i>. Simply Media. 2008. <q>Gender issues, such as the exclusive use of "he", which was the standard in Strunk's day, have been changed to the modern usage of "his" or "her", "you", "they", or "the writer".</q></cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-12">^</a></b> Strunk and White (2009), p. 23.
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-13">^</a></b> <cite>Brody, Miriam (1993). <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=TKptCkp-EjwC&amp;q=%22one+moment+of+felicity%22+robert+louis+stevenson&amp;pg=PA179"><i>Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition</i></a>. SIU Press. p. 179. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780809316915"><bdi>9780809316915</bdi></a>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-14">^</a></b> <cite>William Strunk (1918). <i>The Elements of Style</i>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-15">^</a></b> <cite>Strunk, William; E. B. White (1972) [1959]. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Hd5o74IehyoC&amp;pg=PA55"><i>The Elements of Style</i></a> (2nd ed.). Plain Label Books. pp. 55–56. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-60303-050-2"><bdi>978-1-60303-050-2</bdi></a>. Retrieved 2009-07-23.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-Strunk-1999-p60_16-0">^</a></b> <cite>Strunk, William; E. B. White (1999) [1959]. <a href="https://archive.org/details/elementsofs00stru/page/60"><i>The Elements of Style</i></a> (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn &amp; Bacon. p. <a href="https://archive.org/details/elementsofs00stru/page/60">60</a>. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-205-31342-6"><bdi>978-0-205-31342-6</bdi></a>. <a href="/wiki/OCLC_(identifier)">OCLC</a> <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/41548201">41548201</a>. Retrieved 2009-07-23.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-17">^</a></b> Compare <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style/Misuse#They.">entry "They."</a> in Chapter IV of the 1918 edition. See also <a href="/wiki/Gender-specific_pronoun">gender-specific pronouns</a>.
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-18">^</a></b> <cite><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/lifetimes/white-strunk.html">"Books of the Times"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/The_New_York_Times">The New York Times</a></i>. 1959-06-09. Retrieved 2015-04-10.</cite>
</li>
<li>^ <a href="#cite_ref-pullum-50years_19-0"><sup><i><b>a</b></i></sup></a> <a href="#cite_ref-pullum-50years_19-1"><sup><i><b>b</b></i></sup></a> <cite><a href="/wiki/Geoffrey_Pullum">Pullum, Geoffrey K.</a> (April 17, 2009). <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160413043333/https://www.chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497">"50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/The_Chronicle_of_Higher_Education">The Chronicle of Higher Education</a></i>. <b>55</b> (32): B15. Archived from <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497">the original</a> on 2016-04-13. Retrieved 2017-11-27.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-20">^</a></b> Pullum, Geoffrey (2009). "<a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1505">Sotomayor loves Strunk and White</a>" (June 12). "<a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1485">Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid</a>" (June 6). "<a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1369">Room for debate on Strunk and White</a>" (April 25). Retrieved 2009-06-13. <br />  See also <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5">"prescriptivist poppycock"</a> (tag): other postings on the subject by Pullum, <a href="/wiki/Mark_Liberman">Mark Liberman</a>, and others.
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-21">^</a></b> <cite>Freeman, Jan (October 23, 2005). <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/10/23/frankenstrunk">"Frankenstrunk"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/The_Boston_Globe">The Boston Globe</a></i>. Retrieved 2009-04-12.</cite> (subscription required)
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-22">^</a></b> Skern, Tim (2011). <i>Writing Scientific English: A Workbook</i>. (UTB 3112) Vienna (facultas.wuv). p. 35.
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-23">^</a></b> Britt Peterson (31 August 2014). <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/08/30/why-love-language-police/AL7pZtx1StOOyz5VaeYkPI/story.html">"Why we love the language police"</a>. <i>Boston Globe</i>. Retrieved 09 January 2015.
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-24">^</a></b> <cite><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160204013011/http://opensyllabusproject.org/faq/">"FAQ – the Open Syllabus Project"</a>. Archived from <a href="http://opensyllabusproject.org/faq/">the original</a> on 2016-02-04. Retrieved 2016-02-05.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-25">^</a></b> <cite><a href="http://explorer.opensyllabusproject.org/">"The Open Syllabus Project"</a>. <i>explorer.opensyllabusproject.org</i>.</cite>
</li>
</ol></div>
<h2>External links[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&amp;action=edit&amp;section=10">edit</a>]</h2>
<div>
<p></p>
<div><p><a href="/wiki/Wikisource">Wikisource</a> has original text related to this article:
</p></div></div>
<ul><li></li>
<li> <i><a href="https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134">The Elements of Style</a></i> at <a href="/wiki/Project_Gutenberg">Project Gutenberg</a> (Strunk 1918)</li>
<li> <a href="https://librivox.org/search?title=The+Elements+of+Style&amp;author=Strunk&amp;reader=&amp;keywords=&amp;genre_id=0&amp;status=all&amp;project_type=either&amp;recorded_language=&amp;sort_order=catalog_date&amp;search_page=1&amp;search_form=advanced"><i>The Elements of Style</i></a> public domain audiobook at <a href="/wiki/LibriVox">LibriVox</a> (Strunk 1918)</li>
<li><a href="http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/style-revised.html">Revision</a> of Strunk's original text by <a href="/wiki/John_W._Cowan">John W. Cowan</a> (2006–2008).</li>
<li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070910151358/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9842701/"><i>The Elements of Style</i> as an operatic play</a> at the <a href="/wiki/Wayback_Machine">Wayback Machine</a> (archived September 10, 2007).</li>
<li><a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4985137">Radio piece</a> from <a href="/wiki/National_Public_Radio">NPR</a> discussing illustrated <i>Strunk &amp; White</i> book and musical adaptation.</li>
<li><a href="/wiki/Catherine_Prendergast">Catherine Prendergast</a>: "<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130521234548/http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/schaffner/teaching/fall2010/505/readings/Prendergast.Unabomber.pdf">The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber's Strunk and White</a>", <i><a href="/wiki/College_English">College English</a></i>, Volume 72, Number 1, September 2009.</li></ul>
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 Contents

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 * (Top)
 * 1 History
 * 2 Content
 * 3 Reception
 * 4 Editions
 Toggle Editions subsection
 + 4.1 Strunk
 + 4.2 Strunk & Edward A. Tenney
 + 4.3 Strunk & White
 * 5 See also
 * 6 References
 * 7 External links
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 The Elements of Style

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 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 The Elements of Style
 First expanded edition (1959)
 Author * William Strunk Jr. (1918/1920) 
 * and E. B. White (1959) 
 Illustrator Maira Kalman (2005 only) 
 Country United States 
 Subject American English style guide 
 * Harcourt, Brace & Howe (1920) 
 Publisher * Macmillan (1959) 
 * Allyn & Bacon (1999) 
 Media type Print (Paperback) 
 Pages 43 (1918), 52 (1920),[1] 71 (1959), 105 (1999)
 OCLC 27652766 
 Dewey Decimal 808/.042 21 
 LC Class PE1421 .S7 (Strunk)[1] 
 PE1408 .S772 (Strunk & White) 
 
 Style guides
 * ACS Style Guide 
 * AMA Manual of Style 
 * AP Stylebook 
 * APA Style 
 * The ASA Style Guide 
 * The Bluebook 
 * The Business Style Handbook 
 * California Style Manual 
 * The Cambridge Guide to English Usage 
 * The Chicago Manual of Style 
 * Citing Medicine 
 * The Elements of Style 
 * The Elements of Typographic Style 
 * Fowler's Modern English Usage 
 * Garner's Modern English Usage 
 * IEEE style 
 * ISO 690  
 * MHRA Style Guide 
 * Microsoft Manual of Style 
 * MLA Handbook 
 * The New York Times Manual 
 * The Oxford Guide to Style/New Hart's Rules 
 * Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA) / Oxford style
 * Scientific Style and Format (CSE style) 
 * Turabian: A Manual for Writers 
 *  
 * List of style guide abbreviations 
 * v  
 * t  
 * e  
 

 The Elements of Style is an American English writing style guide in numerous editions. The original was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled". E. B. White greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan in 1959. That was the first edition of the so-called Strunk & White, which Time named in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.[2]

 American poet Dorothy Parker said, regarding the book:

 If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.[3]

 History [ edit ]

 Cornell University English professor William Strunk Jr. wrote The Elements of Style in 1918 and privately published it in 1919, for use at the university. (Harcourt republished it in 52-page format in 1920.)[1] He and editor Edward A. Tenney later revised it for publication as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935). In 1957 the style guide reached the attention of E.B. White at The New Yorker. White had studied writing under Strunk in 1919 but had since forgotten "the little book" that he described as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English". Weeks later, White wrote about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose in his column.[4][5]

 Macmillan and Company subsequently commissioned White to revise The Elements for a 1959 edition (Strunk had died in 1946). White's expansion and modernization of Strunk and Tenney's 1935 revised edition yielded the writing style manual informally known as "Strunk & White", the first edition of which sold about two million copies in 1959. More than ten million copies of three editions were later sold.[6] Mark Garvey relates the history of the book in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style (2009).[7]

 Maira Kalman, who provided the illustrations for The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005, see below), asked Nico Muhly to compose a cantata based on the book. It was performed at the New York Public Library in October 2005.[8][9][10]

 Audiobook versions of The Elements now feature changed wording, citing "gender issues" with the original.[11]

 Content [ edit ]

 Strunk concentrated on the cultivation of good writing and composition; the original 1918 edition exhorted writers to "omit needless words", use the active voice, and employ parallelism appropriately.[12]

 The 1959 edition features White's expansions of preliminary sections, the "Introduction" essay (derived from his magazine story about Strunk), and the concluding chapter, "An Approach to Style", a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English. He also produced the second (1972) and third (1979) editions of The Elements of Style, by which time the book's length had extended to 85 pages.

 The third edition of The Elements of Style (1979) features 54 points: a list of common word-usage errors; 11 rules of punctuation and grammar; 11 principles of writing; 11 matters of form; and, in Chapter V, 21 reminders for better style. The final reminder, the 21st, "Prefer the standard to the offbeat", is thematically integral to the subject of The Elements of Style, yet does stand as a discrete essay about writing lucid prose.[5] To write well, White advises writers to have the proper mind-set, that they write to please themselves, and that they aim for "one moment of felicity", a phrase by Robert Louis Stevenson.[13] Thus Strunk's 1918 recommendation:

 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. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.

 — "Elementary Principles of Composition", The Elements of Style[14]

 Strunk Jr. no longer has a comma in his name in the 1979 and later editions, due to the modernized style recommendation about punctuating such names.

 The fourth edition of The Elements of Style (2000), published 54 years after Strunk's death, omits his stylistic advice about masculine pronouns: "unless the antecedent is or must be feminine".[15] In its place, the following sentence has been added: "many writers find the use of the generic he or his to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive." Further, the re-titled entry "They. He or She", in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions, advises the writer to avoid an "unintentional emphasis on the masculine".[16][17]

 Components new to the fourth edition include a foreword by Roger Angell, stepson of E. B. White, an afterword by the American cultural commentator Charles Osgood, a glossary, and an index. Five years later, the fourth edition text was re-published as The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005), with illustrations by the designer Maira Kalman. This edition excludes the afterword by Osgood and restores the first edition chapter on spelling.

 Reception [ edit ]

 The Elements of Style was listed as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 by Time in its 2011 list.[2] Upon its release, Charles Poor, writing for The New York Times, called it "a splendid trophy for all who are interested in reading and writing."[18]

 Criticism of Strunk & White has largely focused on claims that it has a prescriptivist nature, or that it has become a general anachronism in the face of modern English usage.

 In criticizing The Elements of Style, Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), said that:

 The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules ... It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write however or than me or was or which, but can't tell you why.[19]

 Pullum has argued, for example, that the authors misunderstood what constitutes the passive voice, and he criticized their proscription of established and unproblematic English usages, such as the split infinitive and the use of which in a restrictive relative clause.[19] On Language Log, a blog about language written by linguists, he further criticized The Elements of Style for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among Anglophones, and called it "the book that ate America's brain".[20]

 The Boston Globe 's review described The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005), with illustrations by Maira Kalman, as an "aging zombie of a book ... a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice".[21]

 Nevertheless, many contemporary authors still recommend it highly. Their praise tends to focus on its characterization of good writing and how to achieve it, grammar being just one element of that purpose. In On Writing (2000, p. 11), Stephen King writes: "There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. (Of course, it's short; at eighty-five pages it's much shorter than this one.) I'll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composition is 'Omit needless words.' I will try to do that here."

 In 2011, Tim Skern remarked that The Elements of Style "remains the best book available on writing good English".[22]

 In 2013, Nevile Gwynne reproduced The Elements of Style in his work Gwynne's Grammar. Britt Peterson of the Boston Globe wrote that his inclusion of the book was a "curious addition".[23]

 In 2016, the Open Syllabus Project[24] lists The Elements of Style as the most frequently assigned text in US academic syllabuses, based on an analysis of 933,635 texts appearing in over 1 million syllabuses.[25]

 Editions [ edit ]

 Strunk [ edit ]

 * Elements of Style. Composed in 1918 and privately printed in 1919. 43 pages. OCLC 6589433.
 * The Elements of Style. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. 52-page publication of the original.[1]

 (Because the text of Strunk's original is now in the public domain and freely available on the Internet, publishers can and do reprint it in book form.)

 Strunk & Edward A. Tenney [ edit ]

 * The Elements and Practice of Composition. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Despite the new title, an expansion of (The) Elements of Style; 60 pages plus 47 "practice leaves". OCLC 781988921

 Strunk & White [ edit ]

 * The Elements of Style. New York: Macmillan, 1959. OCLC 878906498.
 * The Elements of Style. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1972. ISBN 0024182605.
 * The Elements of Style. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1979. ISBN 0024181900 (hardback), ISBN 0024182001 (paperback).
 * The Elements of Style. 4th ed. S.l.: Longman, 1999. Hardback. ISBN 0-205-31342-6 (hardback). S.l.: Longman, 2000. ISBN 0-205-30902-X (paperback). With a foreword by Roger Angell.
 * The Elements of Style Illustrated. With illustrations by Maira Kalman. Penguin, 2005. ISBN 1-594-20069-6 (hardback). Penguin, 2005. ISBN 9780910301961 (hardback). Penguin. ISBN 9780143112723 (paperback). Penguin, 2008. ISBN 9781439562635 (paperback).
 * The Elements of Style. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. ISBN 0-205-63264-5. Contains the 4th ed. text; with a foreword by Charles Osgood.[ clarification needed ]

 See also [ edit ]

 * The Complete Plain Words
 * A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
 * Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace

 Several books were titled paying homage to Strunk's, for example:

 * The Elements of Programming Style
 * The Elements of Typographic Style

 References [ edit ]

 1. ^ a b c d "The elements of style" [copyright 1920]. Library of Congress Catalog Record ( LCC ). Retrieved 2014-05-14.
 2. ^ a b Skarda, Erin (August 16, 2011). "Elements of Style". All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books. Time, Inc. Retrieved 2014-05-14 .
 3. ^ Roberts, Sam (21 April 2009). "'The Elements of Style' Turns 50". The New York Times . Retrieved 2015-04-10 .
 4. ^ E. B. White, "Letter from the East", The New Yorker , July 27, 1957, 33 :23: 35–36, 41–43
 5. ^ a b Strunk, William Jr.; White, E. B. (2009). The Elements of Style (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. p. xiii. ISBN 978-0-205-31342-6.
 6. ^ Strunk and White (2009), p. x.
 7. ^ Garvey, Mark (2009). Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4165-9092-7.
 8. ^ Eicher, Jeremy (October 21, 2005). "'Style' Gets New Elements". The New York Times.
 9. ^ Neary, Lynn (November 2, 2005). "'Elements of Style' Goes Beyond Words". NPR Books.
 10. ^ "Nico Muhly". Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Archived from the original on 2014-01-16.
 11. ^ The Elements of Style: 60 Minutes to Better Writing & Grammar (Unabridged Audiobook). Simply Media. 2008. "Gender issues, such as the exclusive use of "he", which was the standard in Strunk's day, have been changed to the modern usage of "his" or "her", "you", "they", or "the writer"."
 12. ^ Strunk and White (2009), p. 23.
 13. ^ Brody, Miriam (1993). Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition. SIU Press. p. 179. ISBN 9780809316915.
 14. ^ William Strunk (1918). The Elements of Style.
 15. ^ Strunk, William; E. B. White (1972) [1959]. The Elements of Style (2nd ed.). Plain Label Books. pp. 55–56. ISBN 978-1-60303-050-2 . Retrieved 2009-07-23 .
 16. ^ Strunk, William; E. B. White (1999) [1959]. The Elements of Style (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. p. 60. ISBN 978-0-205-31342-6. OCLC 41548201 . Retrieved 2009-07-23 .
 17. ^ Compare entry "They." in Chapter IV of the 1918 edition. See also gender-specific pronouns .
 18. ^ "Books of the Times". The New York Times. 1959-06-09 . Retrieved 2015-04-10 .
 19. ^ a b Pullum, Geoffrey K. (April 17, 2009). "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 55 (32): B15. Archived from the original on 2016-04-13 . Retrieved 2017-11-27 .
 20. ^ Pullum, Geoffrey (2009). " Sotomayor loves Strunk and White " (June 12). " Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid " (June 6). " Room for debate on Strunk and White " (April 25). Retrieved 2009-06-13.
 See also "prescriptivist poppycock" (tag): other postings on the subject by Pullum, Mark Liberman , and others.
 21. ^ Freeman, Jan (October 23, 2005). "Frankenstrunk". The Boston Globe . Retrieved 2009-04-12 . (subscription required)
 22. ^ Skern, Tim (2011). Writing Scientific English: A Workbook . (UTB 3112) Vienna (facultas.wuv). p. 35.
 23. ^ Britt Peterson (31 August 2014). "Why we love the language police" . Boston Globe . Retrieved 09 January 2015.
 24. ^ "FAQ – the Open Syllabus Project". Archived from the original on 2016-02-04 . Retrieved 2016-02-05 .
 25. ^ "The Open Syllabus Project". explorer.opensyllabusproject.org.

 External links [ edit ]

 Wikisource has original text related to this article:
 The Elements of Style (Strunk 1918)
 Wikiquote has quotations related to The Elements of Style.
 * 
 * The Elements of Style at Project Gutenberg (Strunk 1918)
 * The Elements of Style public domain audiobook at LibriVox (Strunk 1918)
 * Revision of Strunk's original text by John W. Cowan (2006–2008).
 * The Elements of Style as an operatic play at the Wayback Machine (archived September 10, 2007).
 * Radio piece from NPR discussing illustrated Strunk & White book and musical adaptation.
 * Catherine Prendergast: "The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber's Strunk and White", College English, Volume 72, Number 1, September 2009.
 Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Elements_of_Style&oldid=1130641727"
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
	 
 The Elements of Style       First expanded edition (1959)    Author  
  William Strunk Jr. (1918/1920)
and E. B. White (1959) 
    Illustrator  Maira Kalman (2005 only)   Country United States   Subject American English style guide    Publisher  
  Harcourt, Brace &amp; Howe (1920)
 Macmillan (1959)
 Allyn &amp; Bacon (1999) 
    Media type Print (Paperback)   Pages 43 (1918), 52 (1920), [1]  71 (1959), 105 (1999)     OCLC    27652766       Dewey Decimal    808/.042 21     LC Class   PE1421 .S7 (Strunk) [1]  PE1408 .S772 (Strunk &amp; White)   
  The Elements of Style  is an American English writing style guide in numerous editions. The original was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled". E. B. White greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan in 1959. That was the first edition of the so-called Strunk &amp; White, which  Time  named in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923. [2]  
 
American poet Dorothy Parker said, regarding the book:  If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy. [3]   
History[edit]
 Cornell University English professor William Strunk Jr. wrote The Elements of Style in 1918 and privately published it in 1919, for use at the university. (Harcourt republished it in 52-page format in 1920.) [1]  He and editor Edward A. Tenney later revised it for publication as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935). In 1957 the style guide reached the attention of E.B. White at  The New Yorker . White had studied writing under Strunk in 1919 but had since forgotten "the little book" that he described as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English". Weeks later, White wrote about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose in his column. [4]   [5] 
  Macmillan and Company subsequently commissioned White to revise The Elements for a 1959 edition (Strunk had died in 1946). White's expansion and modernization of Strunk and Tenney's 1935 revised edition yielded the writing style manual informally known as "Strunk &amp; White", the first edition of which sold about two million copies in 1959. More than ten million copies of three editions were later sold. [6]  Mark Garvey relates the history of the book in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk &amp; White's The Elements of Style (2009). [7] 
 Maira Kalman, who provided the illustrations for The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005, see below), asked Nico Muhly to compose a cantata based on the book. It was performed at the New York Public Library in October 2005. [8]   [9]   [10] 
  Audiobook versions of The Elements now feature changed wording, citing "gender issues" with the original. [11] 
Content[edit]
Strunk concentrated on the cultivation of good writing and composition; the original 1918 edition exhorted writers to "omit needless words", use the active voice, and employ parallelism appropriately. [12] 
 The 1959 edition features White's expansions of preliminary sections, the "Introduction" essay (derived from his magazine story about Strunk), and the concluding chapter, "An Approach to Style", a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English. He also produced the second (1972) and third (1979) editions of The Elements of Style, by which time the book's length had extended to 85 pages.
 The third edition of The Elements of Style (1979) features 54 points: a list of common word-usage errors; 11 rules of punctuation and grammar; 11 principles of writing; 11 matters of form; and, in Chapter V, 21 reminders for better style. The final reminder, the 21st, "Prefer the standard to the offbeat", is thematically integral to the subject of The Elements of Style, yet does stand as a discrete essay about writing lucid prose. [5]  To write well, White advises writers to have the proper mind-set, that they write to please themselves, and that they aim for "one moment of felicity", a phrase by Robert Louis Stevenson. [13]  Thus Strunk's 1918 recommendation:
 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. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.  — "Elementary Principles of Composition", The Elements of Style  [14]    
Strunk Jr. no longer has a comma in his name in the 1979 and later editions, due to the modernized style recommendation about punctuating such names.
 The fourth edition of The Elements of Style (2000), published 54 years after Strunk's death, omits his stylistic advice about masculine pronouns: "unless the antecedent is or must be feminine". [15]  In its place, the following sentence has been added: "many writers find the use of the generic he or his to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive." Further, the re-titled entry "They. He or She", in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions, advises the writer to avoid an "unintentional emphasis on the masculine". [16]   [17] 
 Components new to the fourth edition include a foreword by Roger Angell, stepson of E. B. White, an afterword by the American cultural commentator Charles Osgood, a glossary, and an index. Five years later, the fourth edition text was re-published as The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005), with illustrations by the designer Maira Kalman. This edition excludes the afterword by Osgood and restores the first edition chapter on spelling.
Reception[edit]
 The Elements of Style was listed as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 by Time in its 2011 list. [2]  Upon its release, Charles Poor, writing for  The New York Times , called it "a splendid trophy for all who are interested in reading and writing." [18]  
 Criticism of Strunk &amp; White has largely focused on claims that it has a prescriptivist nature, or that it has become a general anachronism in the face of modern English usage.
 
In criticizing The Elements of Style, Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, and co-author of  The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language  (2002), said that:   The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules ... It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write however or than me or was or which, but can't tell you why. [19]   
Pullum has argued, for example, that the authors misunderstood what constitutes the passive voice, and he criticized their proscription of established and unproblematic English usages, such as the split infinitive and the use of which in a restrictive relative clause. [19]  On  Language Log , a blog about language written by linguists, he further criticized The Elements of Style for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among Anglophones, and called it "the book that ate America's brain". [20] 
   The Boston Globe 's review described The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005), with illustrations by Maira Kalman, as an "aging zombie of a book ... a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice". [21] 
 Nevertheless, many contemporary authors still recommend it highly. Their praise tends to focus on its characterization of good writing and how to achieve it, grammar being just one element of that purpose. In  On Writing  (2000, p. 11), Stephen King writes: "There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. (Of course, it's short; at eighty-five pages it's much shorter than this one.) I'll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composition is 'Omit needless words.' I will try to do that here."
 In 2011, Tim Skern remarked that The Elements of Style "remains the best book available on writing good English". [22] 
 In 2013, Nevile Gwynne reproduced The Elements of Style in his work  Gwynne's Grammar . Britt Peterson of the  Boston Globe  wrote that his inclusion of the book was a "curious addition". [23] 
 In 2016, the Open Syllabus Project  [24]  lists The Elements of Style as the most frequently assigned text in US academic syllabuses, based on an analysis of 933,635 texts appearing in over 1 million syllabuses. [25] 
Editions[edit]
Strunk[edit]
  Elements of Style. Composed in 1918 and privately printed in 1919. 43 pages. OCLC 6589433.
 The Elements of Style. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. 52-page publication of the original. [1]   
(Because the text of Strunk's original is now in the public domain and freely available on the Internet, publishers can and do reprint it in book form.)
Strunk &amp; Edward A. Tenney[edit]
  The Elements and Practice of Composition. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Despite the new title, an expansion of (The) Elements of Style; 60 pages plus 47 "practice leaves". OCLC 781988921  
Strunk &amp; White[edit]
  The Elements of Style. New York: Macmillan, 1959. OCLC 878906498.
 The Elements of Style. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1972. ISBN 0024182605.
 The Elements of Style. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1979. ISBN 0024181900 (hardback), ISBN 0024182001 (paperback).
 The Elements of Style. 4th ed. S.l.: Longman, 1999. Hardback. ISBN 0-205-31342-6 (hardback). S.l.: Longman, 2000. ISBN 0-205-30902-X (paperback). With a foreword by Roger Angell.
 The Elements of Style Illustrated. With illustrations by Maira Kalman. Penguin, 2005. ISBN 1-594-20069-6 (hardback). Penguin, 2005. ISBN 9780910301961 (hardback). Penguin. ISBN 9780143112723 (paperback). Penguin, 2008. ISBN 9781439562635 (paperback).
 The Elements of Style. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. ISBN 0-205-63264-5. Contains the 4th ed. text; with a foreword by Charles Osgood.[ clarification needed ]  
See also[edit]
   The Complete Plain Words  
  A Dictionary of Modern English Usage  
  Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace   
Several books were titled paying homage to Strunk's, for example:
   The Elements of Programming Style  
  The Elements of Typographic Style   
References[edit]
 
^    a       b       c       d    "The elements of style" [copyright 1920]. Library of Congress Catalog Record (LCC). Retrieved 2014-05-14.
^    a       b    Skarda, Erin (August 16, 2011). "Elements of Style". All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books. Time, Inc. Retrieved 2014-05-14.
  ^  Roberts, Sam (21 April 2009). "'The Elements of Style' Turns 50".  The New York Times . Retrieved 2015-04-10.
  ^  E. B. White, "Letter from the East", The New Yorker, July 27, 1957, 33:23:35–36, 41–43
^    a       b    Strunk, William Jr.; White, E. B. (2009).  The Elements of Style  (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. p. xiii. ISBN  978-0-205-31342-6 .
  ^  Strunk and White (2009), p. x.
  ^  Garvey, Mark (2009).  Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk &amp; White's The Elements of Style . Simon &amp; Schuster. ISBN  978-1-4165-9092-7 .
  ^  Eicher, Jeremy (October 21, 2005). "'Style' Gets New Elements". The New York Times.
  ^  Neary, Lynn (November 2, 2005). "'Elements of Style' Goes Beyond Words". NPR Books.
  ^   "Nico Muhly".  Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra . Archived from the original on 2014-01-16.
  ^   The Elements of Style: 60 Minutes to Better Writing &amp; Grammar (Unabridged Audiobook). Simply Media. 2008. Gender issues, such as the exclusive use of "he", which was the standard in Strunk's day, have been changed to the modern usage of "his" or "her", "you", "they", or "the writer". 
  ^  Strunk and White (2009), p. 23.
  ^  Brody, Miriam (1993).  Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition . SIU Press. p. 179. ISBN  9780809316915 .
  ^  William Strunk (1918). The Elements of Style.
  ^  Strunk, William; E. B. White (1972) [1959].  The Elements of Style  (2nd ed.). Plain Label Books. pp. 55–56. ISBN  978-1-60303-050-2 . Retrieved 2009-07-23.
  ^  Strunk, William; E. B. White (1999) [1959].  The Elements of Style  (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn &amp; Bacon. p. 60. ISBN  978-0-205-31342-6 . OCLC 41548201. Retrieved 2009-07-23.
  ^  Compare entry "They." in Chapter IV of the 1918 edition. See also gender-specific pronouns.
  ^   "Books of the Times".  The New York Times . 1959-06-09. Retrieved 2015-04-10.
^    a       b     Pullum, Geoffrey K. (April 17, 2009). "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice".  The Chronicle of Higher Education . 55 (32): B15. Archived from the original on 2016-04-13. Retrieved 2017-11-27.
  ^  Pullum, Geoffrey (2009). "Sotomayor loves Strunk and White" (June 12). "Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid" (June 6). "Room for debate on Strunk and White" (April 25). Retrieved 2009-06-13.   See also "prescriptivist poppycock" (tag): other postings on the subject by Pullum, Mark Liberman, and others.
  ^  Freeman, Jan (October 23, 2005). "Frankenstrunk".  The Boston Globe . Retrieved 2009-04-12. (subscription required)
  ^  Skern, Tim (2011). Writing Scientific English: A Workbook. (UTB 3112) Vienna (facultas.wuv). p. 35.
  ^  Britt Peterson (31 August 2014). "Why we love the language police". Boston Globe. Retrieved 09 January 2015.
  ^   "FAQ – the Open Syllabus Project". Archived from the original on 2016-02-04. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  ^   "The Open Syllabus Project". explorer.opensyllabusproject.org.
 
External links[edit]
 
  Wikisource has original text related to this article:
  
  
  The Elements of Style  at Project Gutenberg (Strunk 1918)
  The Elements of Style  public domain audiobook at LibriVox (Strunk 1918)
 Revision of Strunk's original text by John W. Cowan (2006–2008).
  The Elements of Style as an operatic play at the Wayback Machine (archived September 10, 2007).
 Radio piece from NPR discussing illustrated Strunk &amp; White book and musical adaptation.
 Catherine Prendergast: "The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber's Strunk and White",  College English , Volume 72, Number 1, September 2009.
The Elements of Style - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33514.The_Elements_of_Style
The Elements of Style
2023-01-01
Author
<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/90158-patricia"></a></section><section><p>132 reviews18 followers</p></section></div><section><section><p><b>Read</b></p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1347552">February 23, 2010</a></section><div><p>This book is good for the following things: <p>1. Propping up a short table leg</p><p>2. Lining a bird cage</p><p>3. Building a fire</p><p>4. Using as a coaster for cold drinks</p><p>I devoted some of my grammar thesis to criticizing this book, and it was time well spent. </p><p>Geoff Nunberg may have said it best: "The weird thing is to see rules like these passed down as traditional linguistic wisdom. Take that edict that you ought to say "10 persons" rather than "10 people." You can still find it in the recent editions of Strunk and White's revered Elements of Style, along with antique admonitions against saying "contact us" or calling something "worthwhile." The linguist Arnold Zwicky calls these zombie rules. Somebody should have run them through a wood chipper long ago, but here we are in 2010 assigning students a style guide that tells them that correct English requires them to write, "There were 5,000 screaming persons at the Lady Gaga concert." <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124001415&amp;sc=fb&amp;cc=fp">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/90158?shelf=english">english</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/17730703-robin-hobb"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>272 books96.3k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/553402881">June 5, 2021</a></section><div><p>Yes. This is a very good book for anyone who wants to write anything. <p>Of course, you can break any rule when you are writing. But I believe that is more effective when you know the rule you are breaking, and you know why you are breaking it. </p><p>No matter if you are writing a high school book report or a novel, familiarity with these old fashioned guide to writing can be helpful.</p><p>I recommend it for any writer's reference shelf.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/17730703?shelf=essential-references">essential-references</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1758594-patrick-gibson"></a></section><section><p>818 reviews66 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64021785">July 18, 2009</a></section><div><p>I remember, my Freshman year, sitting in the Music Building lounge waiting for my next class when Maryanne came crashing in, with an appropriate amount of chaos, announcing to all “Oh crap, I can’t find my Strunk and White.” Everyone else in the room apparently knew what she was talking about, but I sat with a blank stare. A few weeks latter my required English 101 professor insisted we hit the bookstore and buy ‘The Elements of Style.’ We were to treat it like the Holy Grail of grammar, carry it with us at all times, sleep with it, and consider it our eternal faithful lover. This would become the first of many copies of Strunk &amp; White that have come and gone in my life. I think at one time I actually had four copies. Maryanne, made a similar pontification in the same lounge a month later “Oh no, I have lost my Boosey &amp; Hawkes”* which I did understand. It may have sounded more erotic than Strunk &amp; White but certainly less dramatic. For me Boosies and Hawksies came and went, but Strunks and Whites have remained constant. <p>This year, for my birthday, I received yet another copy. Only this edition is hardback and Illustrated! At first I thought: how queer can this be? It has got to be a mistake. It’s a grammar book! This had to be a novel, a book on fashion, or something sharing a name. Nope. Same Strunk &amp; White – only this time with pictures. </p><p>Over the years, I have acquired other books on grammar (even one on Pittsburgh diction—go figure) but none can compare. The Elements of Style is concise, easy to understand and practically perfect. It’s the best. Ever.</p><p>And a very clever artist has figured out how to illustrate sentence fragments, misused words, the hyphen, participle phrases and lots of other teeth gritting English stumbling blocks—in a very Magritte sort of way.</p><p>Yet, there is one thing, even the most excellent book, won’t be able to do, as, my friends will attest, and this, would be, comma abuse, of which, I am the Master.</p><p>*It’s a Music Publisher</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1758594?shelf=nerdboy">nerdboy</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/124132123-lisa-of-troy"></a></section><section><p>376 reviews2,811 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4609641897">February 3, 2023</a></section><div><p><b>Lisa of Troy Takes on Two Prestigious Literary Heavyweights</b><p>Round One</p><p>Ding! Ding!</p><p>When I was in high school, my Spanish teacher frightened me to the point where I wouldn’t speak. It was one of those situations where you internally plead, “Please don’t call on me. Please don’t call on me.” Of course, disaster struck. During one class, I got something in my eye. Tears were streaming down my face. The other students noticed and essentially crowd-surfed me up to the front of the class, explaining the situation in rapid fire Spanish. After nearly 20 years, I still remember this experience so vividly.</p><p>This fear-based environment profoundly impacted my Spanish skills in a negative way.</p><p>Do you want to know when I learned the most Spanish?</p><p>When I was at university, I met two native Spanish speaking students – one from Mexico and one from Venezuela. We would learn from each other. We would talk in a mixture of Spanish and English, discussing things like to how order from Subway when you didn’t know the name of all of the toppings (ultimately, we settled on using words like “this”, “that”, and pointing). My learning extended beyond dated textbooks, and I learned slang, swear words, and listened to music in Spanish for fun. Soon I even started dreaming in Spanish. There wasn’t a person of authority, no “I’m-better-than-you.” We learned from each other, and we unlocked worlds by doing so.</p><p>This book transported me back into Spanish class.</p><p>If Charlotte’s Web is a hug, The Elements of Style is a punch in the face.</p><p>Although the authors have passion and enthusiasm, this book lacks kindness, basic respect, and empathy. The authors write in such a conceited tone as if they are talking to peasants.</p><p>Shall we look at some examples? Strunk/EB White in italics below.</p><p><i>Colloquialisms. If you use a colloquialism or slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better.</i></p><p><i>Enthuse. An annoying verb growing out of the noun enthusiasm. Not recommended.</i></p><p>I am not enthused by the authors’ pompous demeanor.</p><p><i>Finalize. A pompous ambiguous verb.</i></p><p>Is this the author’s favorite word then?</p><p><i>Meaningful. A bankrupt adjective. Choose another, or rephrase. </i></p><p><i>Prestigious. Often an adjective of last resort. It’s in the dictionary, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it.</i></p><p>He says that you are illiterate if you don’t know that inflammable means combustible.</p><p><i>The truth is…The fact is…A bad beginning for a sentence. If you feel you are possessed of the truth, or of the fact, simply state it. Do not give it advance billing.</i></p><p>Extreme disagree! The truth is always perks up my ears. What is the truth? What is the point? </p><p>This shame-based education should be a thing of the past. </p><p><i>Do not affect a breezy manner.</i></p><p>Terrible advice. What I loved so much about Project Hail Mary is that I felt like one of my nerdy friends was having a conversation with me. Rick Riordan in the Percy Jackson series took some classic Greek mythology, modernized the language, and retold the myths in an unpretentious, interesting way, making them his own.</p><p><i>In ordinary composition, use orthodox spelling. Do not write nite for night, thru for through, pleez for please, unless you plan to introduce a complete system of simplified spelling and are prepared to take the consequences.</i></p><p>Stay in your lane, Strunk, telling me what I can and cannot write! This paper is my canvas. As the painter, there are no limits. My creativity isn’t bounded. If I want to say, “Good nite, my readers!” who cares? Maybe it will wake some people up. Why can’t I use magic in my writing? Why can’t I make up words or spelling, stretching myself, pushing readers to think outside the box?</p><p>Overly stuffy and formal writing and expecting strict compliance to a rigid set of rules is paralyzing. </p><p>The truth is that plot, character, and setting as well as using appropriate sentence and paragraph length are more important than using a few words correctly. In fact, I have already violated several of the rules of The Elements of Style in this review. </p><p><i>Avoid foreign language. It is a bad habit. Write in English.</i></p><p>What about carpe diem? Seize the day? Readers are smart. Treat them as such.</p><p><i>Avoid fancy words. Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready, and able.</i></p><p>Isn’t that one of the beauties of reading? Ordinarily, our vocabulary is limited to a certain set of words in our everyday usage; however, when you read you get to dust off those fancy words, words that you recognize but you don’t often use when you speak. When I encounter a fancy word, I feel like when I am walking along a beach and find an amazing seashell. The fancy words are beautiful treasures.</p><p>For example, take the first sentence from His Dark Materials by my favorite author, Philip Pullman:</p><p>Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.</p><p>Darkening is not a word that I normally say out loud, but I really enjoyed it in this sentence. Of course, fancy words should be balanced. If I attempted to use the thesaurus to change every single word into something more sophisticated, the sentence would sound ridiculous and take away from the storytelling. </p><p><i>Do not inject opinion.</i></p><p>Is this guy joking? This is classic, “Do as I say and not as I do.”</p><p><i>No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.</i></p><p>Who proofread this? The entire book is distrustful of the reader and is patronizing. Also, you don’t need a comma between “intelligence” and “or.” What kind of grammar book is this?</p><p>Time for street justice. Who won: Lisa of Troy or Strunk/EB White? Put your “two cents” in the comments! </p><p><b>Connect With Me!</b><br /><a href="https://lisaoftroy.com/">Blog</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Lisa_of_Troy">Twitter</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvmSewQ0IGOzDnuMZNUKTbg">BookTube</a> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/LisaofTroy">Facebook</a> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/lisa_of_troy/">Insta</a></p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/84023-j-g-keely"></a></section><section><p>546 reviews9,422 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7858880">December 26, 2014</a></section><div><p>There must be some structure to language. We must agree on some aspects of it, and creating rules and definitions around those mutual agreements helps to foster intelligibility throughout the language.<p>Likewise, this agreement to abide by these rules means that we can teach communication. This does not mean only in the case of children, but it certainly simplifies it for them. This also means that writers can continue to learn, to interact, and to write understandably and not wastefully.</p><p>We take these rules from traditions, but also from common sense. Strunk's rulings on word use (especially amongst words with similar meanings) are based on the root words, and the original meanings. Strunk means to separate these similar words so that instead of synonyms, we have two similar but precise words.</p><p>This also prevents confusion, as various English dialects may take these words in different ways, but all share the same roots.</p><p>However, language changes constantly, so regulating it and placing rules on it is difficult. Many feel that it stifles creativity, or that it places hegemonic power in the hands of the elite. One benefit of this regulation is that we can read Shakespeare today with little trouble.</p><p>Dictionaries came into popularity around the time of Shakespeare, as did the study of philology. We have more trouble reading Chaucer, even though only two-hundred years separate Chaucer and Shakespeare, while twice that length separates Shakespeare from us.</p><p>The work of Strunk and White is not to close off language, nor to set it absolutely free, but to make a linguistic analysis of its forms, meanings and changes, but one that the layman can appreciate. The work is somewhat dated by today's standards, but this actually provides the perfect example for many of the book's observations on the mutability of language.</p><p>It likewise supports the assertion that language may change, but not as much as you might think. Strunk and White is just as useful to an author today as it was when it was compiled.</p><p>It is light-hearted and often humorous, and presents language and communication in a thoughtful way. Any writer should come away from this book with a new respect for language, and with a keener eye for seeing their own writing.</p><p>While the book sometimes seems severe in its regulations, this is only because misuse is so rampant and so ugly. Similarly, someone might tell you "under no circumstances should you balance on a chair on the edge of the roof of a ten story building". This rule is perfectly reasonable, despite the fact that some well-trained, adventurous individuals are quite capable of this feat.</p><p>The fact remains that for the majority, violating these simple rules will result in an unsightly mess. A talented and experienced writer can flaunt and even break the rules when it suits him. The greatest writers do, and this book gives examples of how and why they do it.</p><p>However, rules are how we create meaning. Whether you follow them or break them, you must know them and understand how they work in order to communicate to your reader. You cannot subvert and idea unless you understand it, and you cannot communicate anything to your reader that doesn't have a basis in their experiences and understanding.</p><p>There is no impressive act of creation that is not conscious and considered, because rebellion cannot happen in a void. It's the rule that proves the exception.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/84023?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/84023?shelf=reference">reference</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/84023?shelf=reviewed">reviewed</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/166376-david"></a></section><section><p>865 reviews1,271 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3007854">March 2, 2011</a></section><div><p>In her charming essay, "Insert a Carrot", Anne Fadiman describes a trait shared by everyone in her family - a heightened sensitivity to the flaws in other people's writing. The Fadimans all belong to that tribe whose members cannot read without simultaneously copy-editing. When dining out, they amuse each other by pointing out typos on the menu. It might seem obnoxious, but really they just can't help it. If you're blessed with the copy-editing gene you can't just switch it off. <p>I have the same problem. When I read, typographical and grammatical errors leap off the page, assailing my eyeballs, demanding to be noticed. A distraction that I am incapable of ignoring, they hijack my attention and diminish my respect for the author. I want my own writing to be free of such distractions; it should be forceful and persuasive. I welcome constructive advice that helps me attain that goal. My copy of "Modern American Usage" is grubby and well-thumbed. I think its author, Bryan A. Garner, has accomplished something quite remarkable. He has written a usage guide that gives writers clear, concrete, reasoned advice, without being overly dogmatic or erring on the side of sloppiness. I hate sloppy writing. </p><p>I also hate Strunk and White. Its popularity is inexplicable to me. Here are just a few of my objections:</p><p>1. Their famous motto, "Omit needless words", is fatuous and has absolutely no practical value. (If I knew how to do this, I'd already be some kind of great communication guru.) Repeating this essentially vapid advice in similarly empty formulations like "Be clear" and "Don't explain too much" is of no practical help to anybody, and suggests that even the authors have difficulty in deciphering their own admonitions.</p><p>2. The stylistic tips that are not simply platitudinous are often just silly, hopelessly vague, or reflective of the long outdated prejudices of a couple of old white dudes. </p><p>For example - </p><p>Do not inject opinion.<br />Prefer the standard to the offbeat.<br />Do not use dialect unless your ear is good. <br />Write with nouns and verbs.<br />Don't construct awkward adverbs.<br />Avoid fancy words.<br />Use figures of speech sparingly.<br />Do not overwrite.</p><p>Having trouble figuring out whether your ear is "good", your adverb is "awkward", or your writing is "over"? Good luck with that. S &amp; W will be of no help whatsoever. Why not?</p><p>3. The examples used to illustrate "bad" style in the book are generally ludicrously bad. The need for correction is so glaringly obvious that the examples have little instructive value. The authors are well able to demolish straw men, but if you want advice on a subtle point, they are unlikely to be of any practical help.</p><p>4. The fetishistic obsession with avoiding the passive voice is (a) baffling (b) profoundly irritating when some freaking paperclip starts to lecture you about it (c) so obviously idiotic that the authors themselves ignore it throughout the book. </p><p>Other questionable decrees include the ukase that "none" should always take a singular verb, the prohibition on starting a sentence with "however", and the pointless "which/that" discussion.</p><p>These exemplify one of the book's biggest problems, which - to be fair - is not necessarily the authors' fault. It has achieved the status of a kind of sacred text, with all of the problems that result. People become blind to the internal inconsistencies within the text, it gets quoted with the kind of self-righteous zeal characteristic to "true believers" and to similar ends. Instead of stimulating thoughtful discussion, S &amp; W is wielded as a weapon to end it. Which might not be so terrible if the advice it contains were not so vague, idiosyncratic and frequently inconsistent. Probably the most infuriating aspect of writing our book was my co-author's continual invocation of Strunk and White as the final arbiter. One can only wonder by whose authority these two gentlemen were anointed God.</p><p>In a cunning marketing gimmick, the latest edition of Strunk and White has been jazzed up by including illustrations by Maira Kalman. Ms Kalman is a delightful artist, whose work elsewhere I greatly admire. But she really should have said no to this particular project. Her illustrations are occasionally pretty, sometimes baffling, but generally pointless. They add no particular insight, though some readers may find them a welcome distraction from the barked eccentricities of the book's two main authors.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166376?shelf=words-and-language">words-and-language</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/27098959-leonard-gaya"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>1 book809 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1964145370">April 16, 2020</a></section><div><p>“It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric”, says professor Strunk. The old fart was probably referring to his students at Cornell University. <i>The Elements of Style</i> is indeed a dusty textbook (1918), but still widely in use today. It aims at providing a set of rules and tips on how to write properly, if not elegantly. Stephen King, in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/10569.On_Writing_A_Memoir_of_the_Craft">On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft</a>, strongly recommends this book to any aspiring fiction writer.<p>In truth, such rules as, for instance, the pre-eminence of the active over the passive voice, or the superiority of the positive over the negative mode in a sentence (which, at the time, were perhaps not as evident), have become the sesame of communication, advocated at school, in business and even in spelling and grammar software.</p><p>Some of Strunk’s remarks are amusing, sarcastic even, like this one on the use of the word <i>Nature</i>: “Often vaguely used in such expressions as “a lover of nature;” “poems about nature.” Unless more specific statements follow, the reader cannot tell whether the poems have to do with natural scenery, rural life, the sunset, the untracked wilderness, or the habits of squirrels.”</p><p>While this hodgepodge of rules is at best a bit arbitrary and, at worst, quite outdated, the core of it all is to prompt students to write boldly, confidently, legibly, with crispness and vigour, and avoid fizzling out with sloppy writing — nothing wrong about that.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/541343-kenny"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>22 books47 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7706597">October 14, 2007</a></section><div><p>The gold standard. No more need be said than to quote Mr. Strunk's thoughts under the headline "Omit Needless Words":<p>"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. This requires not that the reader make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that <i>every word tell</i>."</p><p>And every word of Mr. Strunk's (as updated and expanded by the brilliant and self-effacing E.B. White) indeed does tell.</p><p>Don't touch your keyboard without reading this book!</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/541343?shelf=writing-craft">writing-craft</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/14046996-roy-lotz"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>1 book8,093 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/513006436">March 15, 2021</a></section><div><p>I still remember, and will always remember, my 11th grade English class. Before that year, English class had meant little more than vocabulary tests, book reports, and those five-paragraph (hamburger) essays. But this class was different. Our teacher was not interested in getting us to pass a standardized test; instead, she wanted to really <i>teach</i> us how to read and write.<p>To my astonishment, I realized that nobody had ever done that before. I had been taught how to write a five-paragraph essay, but not how to write. I had been taught how to pass tests on books, but not how to read them. Writing formulaic essays and passing multiple-choice tests requires certain skills: brute memorization and learning by rote. But reading and writing require something much different: a sensitivity to the written word. Integral to developing this sensitivity was reading this slim volume.</p><p><i>The Elements of Style</i> is normally billed as a kind of guidebook or instruction manual—these are the rules of grammar; these are the rules of style: follow them and you will produce good writing. And, indeed, this is how the book is formatted. But half of Strunk’s rules of grammar and usage are hopelessly outdated; the other half will probably be outdated in another fifty years. What’s more, how can anyone hope to encapsulate ‘good style’, since highly respected authors have written an enormous variety of styles?</p><p>No; the value of this book lies neither in its rules of grammar nor of style. It is valuable because Strunk and White cherish language. Consider this quote: “The colon has more effect than the comma, less power to separate than the semicolon, and more formality than the dash.” Now, this may or may not be true; I’m not saying it isn’t. My point is that, regardless, what’s important is Strunk’s attitude—that he cared deeply enough about writing to sit down and describe the feelings evoked by punctuation. To my high school self, this was beyond belief.</p><p>Strunk felt that writing was about communication—getting your point across fully without wasting the reader’s time. Say what you will about him, he was not a hypocrite; this little book can be read in one sitting. In fact, so fully does this book live up to its author’s ideals, that the reader gets a full dose of his personality. When reading Strunk's taut bullet points—“Put statements into positive form!” “Omit needless words!”—you can almost hear him yelling them in a crowded classroom—his voice harsh and nasal, his skin pale, his face cleanly shaven, wearing a tweed jacket and tapping the lectern with an open palm.</p><p><i>“Omit needless words!”</i> he says again, this time with a slight grin. And with that grin, you both realize the obvious: that he’s secretly thankful for all the writers who don’t abide by his principles; otherwise, he would have nothing to be grumpy about.</p><p>The point is not that you write this way or that; the point is that you care about the way you choose.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/14046996?shelf=help-me-help-myself">help-me-help-myself</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/14046996?shelf=highly-recommended-favorites">highly-recommended-favorites</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/14046996?shelf=prose-style">prose-style</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/60783869-daniel-cowan"></a></section><section><p>6 reviews4 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2865067763">June 20, 2019</a></section><div><p>This is a wonderful book for beginning writers to use as a guide. It cleary spells out the rules of English grammar, and provides examples to explain each guideline. I highly recommend this little gem! I bought this book at special price from here:<br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-General-Press/dp/9389157129/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=9789389157123&amp;qid=1561030348&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style...</a></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3920693-richard-derus"></a></section><section><p>2,855 reviews1,888 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1848674054">December 24, 2016</a></section><div><p>Rating: 5* of five<p>The essential guide to HOW to write! How much better to start with a guide to achieving an effect you're looking for.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3335664-david"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>17 books333 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/595831746">April 21, 2013</a></section><div><p>It is very good for what it does, which is advise on how to write clearly and concisely. But generations of writers have completely misunderstood its purpose and used it as a Bible of Good Writing. It's not. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum has famously gone on something of a <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497">crusade</a> against <i>The Elements of Style</i>, and while he makes good points, it may be a little unfair to blame S&amp;W for the fact that writers don't realize the original authors were addressing an audience of barely-literate college students. If you are a fiction writer, S&amp;W's advice should be taken with a very large grain of salt — if you try to write novels using <i>The Elements of Style</i> as your guide, you will probably write very cleanly and correctly but very badly.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3335664?shelf=grammar">grammar</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3335664?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3335664?shelf=owned">owned</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4567704-l-s-popovich"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>2 books306 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3228361219">March 12, 2020</a></section><div><p>Many other books on writing are not as directly helpful as this one. I have made every mistake a human being can make while writing. I'm making mistakes right now. Improvement is a lifelong process. This readable and referenceable book is one to keep in the desk drawer, to peruse before and after writing.<p>Aside from the argument that the English language is sliding toward less standardization, many editors, agents, publishers and readers demand or expect PhD-level grammar (whatever that equates to). But it really should not take years of reading and diagramming sentences to put words together in a satisfactory fashion.</p><p>If you have tried other how-to-write books, I'd set them aside until you've finished this one. This may contain all you need to know in a much smaller bundle. As a rule, I am not a fan of criticism. I could pick apart most pieces of writing. You could pick apart most of what I write. It's human nature to seek out flaws. In order to write competitively, writers must arm themselves against critics. But even more than that, communication benefits from clarity and articulation. I feel that a close study of this book will elevate a writer's awareness of certain flaws. These flaws pass most of us by without notice. But they can also undermine an otherwise excellent piece of writing. </p><p>Wouldn't we all like to write at a level where grammar is no longer part of the equation, where each sentence unfurls from the pen with the pithy lightning strike of Oscar Wilde's polished prose, on the first draft of course, where we can excavate the furthest reaches of our imagination and mind without regard to "should the comma go here, or here?" But I am not sure if such a state of nirvana exists. Revision never ends.</p><p>In summary, I recommend picking up this book. I trust it much more than those bloggers (paid by the word) posting "Helpful Tips."</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4567704?shelf=2020">2020</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4567704?shelf=5-star">5-star</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4567704?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/58979645-tassa-desalada"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>12 books271 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2839890077">May 30, 2019</a></section><div><p>This small book is a mountain of good writing advice! </p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/141447699-lusy"></a></section><section><p>17 reviews16 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4302515529">July 3, 2022</a></section><div><p><br /><p>To quote <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/3389.Stephen_King">Stephen King</a> in the foreword of his book <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/7143113.On_Writing_A_Memoir_of_the_Craft">On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft</a>: "<i>I figured the shorter the book, the less the nonsense*. One notable exception to the nonsense* rule is <b>The Element of Styles</b>, by <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/6437238.William_Strunk_Jr_">William Strunk Jr.</a> and <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/988142.E_B__White">E.B. White</a>. There is little or no detectable nonsense* in that book.</i>" </p><p>I agree with that statement! </p><p>This book is not perfect so of course it's got some errors. However, there are reasons this is considered one of the most important books on writing. The fact that it stands the test of time since its first publication in 1918 also goes to show how helpful it's been to a lot of people. </p><p>I based my review on my own experiences and observations. From what I can see, the main lesson for most people I know who have read this book is 'omit needless words' which is good and might be music to an editor's ears but it's more than that to me! It shows how clear thinking will produce clear writing which is a great deal in communicating a message to others. </p><p>Every time I revisit it, I'm reminded of not only how much I can learn from my past mistakes but also how much more I need to know in order to improve myself. It's a very humbling learning experience! The playful and vibrant illustrations by <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/55084.Maira_Kalman">Maira Kalman</a> in this edition also make learning from this book more enjoyable and fun. </p><p>Knowing the elements of our writing style will help us express our voices better. Like someone dear to me used to say: To live is to serve. In the end, if the expression of our voices is clear, so much so that it can help others find their voices as well? Then that's all that matters! </p><p>* = edited words <br />Picture credit: unsplash.com</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/141447699?shelf=favourites">favourites</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/141447699?shelf=language">language</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/141447699?shelf=priority-list">priority-list</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/30059190----"><i></i></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>0 books249 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1459736544">November 3, 2016</a></section><div><p>Write to-day, to-night, to-morrow (but not together) with hyphen.<p>Write any one, every one, some one, some time (except the sense of formerly) as two words.</p><p>Thanking you in advance. This sounds as if the writer meant, "It will not be worth my while to write to you again." Simply write, "Thanking you," and if the favor which you have requested is granted, write a letter of acknowledgment.</p><p>#Life-Writing-Lessons!</p><p></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/30059190?shelf=100-pages">100-pages</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/30978160-meredith-slowly-catching-up"></a></section><section><p>771 reviews12.1k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1121610007">March 11, 2015</a></section><div><p>I find this book fascinating, especially when comparing it to modern style guides. While it won't become my go to when working with students, I consider it a valuable resource. </p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/30978160?shelf=first-reads">first-reads</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/13080935-simon-fay"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>4 books154 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2055584381">July 10, 2017</a></section><div><p>As a couple of reviewers have mentioned, Elements of Style has become somewhat out of style. There are plenty of people who stand by it as a trusted source for all things grammar, but I imagine even diehard supporters will grudgingly admit that the standards it established have led to some truly convoluted sentences.<p>Even so, I still recommend it as a handy pocketbook for anybody who's interested in the craft of writing. When I originally read it a number of years ago, I was a little strict in following the rules it outlined. It had a negative impact on my writing. But as I outgrew some of the habits it taught me, I began to think of it more as a leap off point for amateur wordsmiths, a sturdy foundation for beginners to build their own style on.</p><p>Yes, there are probably more up to date guides on grammar and writing, but I haven't read those, so my rating for this book exists in a vacuum of sorts: It's a good manual if you take it as the beginning of wisdom, not the end. Most importantly, the material is simple and engaging. The examples and logic are straightforward. And at the very least it will get you playing with the English language. </p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/49415231-amir-tesla"></a></section><section><p>161 reviews655 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2464943157">August 13, 2020</a></section><div><p>This is an essential book on the basic principles of a good writing style. <br />A must-read for anyone who aspires to be a serious writer. (Stephan King)</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1433962-eric"></a></section><section><p>68 reviews1 follower</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/41731169">January 3, 2009</a></section><div><p>I never thought I would say this about a book, but every writer needs to read this book. Hell, if you plan on writing anything you should read this book. The title is very misleading. Anyone who came across it for the first time might think it was a book about "style" as an artform. For those who are worried about the pedantry of writing, this book is mostly about grammar and what can be more effective in using the English language. This needs to be in the curriculumn for high schools, especially now when grammar is being forgotten so that people can e-mail and sound stupid on myspace. I only had two bones to pick with this book: First, I thought a comment E.B. White made in terms of using only "he" instead of "she" as a universal antecedent for sentences that may begin, "One must watch his/her step," is a bit off for somebody who studies language. On one hand we have someone in love with language who agrees with Strunk that student body should be replaced with studentry, and on the other hand White is giving in to gender roles within language. A bit silly, and as many readers might have picked recognized, writing books have "she" in a lot of them. Second, White made a comment about not using a foreign language in a work which, though I agree can be confusing, can still be pulled off. The way it came across was distasteful. But those are perhaps just comments on what I might feel about White as a person and not as a writer or teacher. Get this book! </p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1433962?shelf=favorites">favorites</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/50966750-da-al"></a></section><section><p>360 reviews359 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3937285849">April 10, 2021</a></section><div><p>Who knew a book about grammar could be so entertaining &amp; useful? And Frank McCourt is the perfect choice to perform the audiobook!</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/50966750?shelf=audio-books">audio-books</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/50966750?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/44487975-dannii-elle"></a></section><section><p>1,966 reviews1,385 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1730182827">November 22, 2016</a></section><div><p>I find it very impressive that this was written almost one hundred years ago and still remains so relevant and revered today.<p>The book does exactly what the title suggests – covers stylistic elements of the English language. Each rule covered has multiple examples attached to it for proficient understanding and it managed to be both highly informative, whilst offering me nothing new. This is certainly of great practical help in academic writing, but I found it rather lacking for my current desires. </p><p>I listened to this in audiobook form and I don't think it was really suited towards that format. The information was relayed in a dry and uninspiring style that felt a little repetitive and I could feel my attention dwindling as I attempted to process the over-abundance of information. The grammatical advice was not new to me, which allowed my attention to drift further, and I think I would have more appreciation for this if I had discovered it sooner. </p><p>This covers the basic grammatical and stylistic principles of good academic writing and I feel it is a good starter manual for any budding writer. Unfortunately, I was expecting something different going into this and it wasn't exactly what I was currently looking for.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/44487975?shelf=adult-books-read">adult-books-read</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/44487975?shelf=authorial-advice">authorial-advice</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/44487975?shelf=non-fiction-nuances">non-fiction-nuances</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/67130556-prakriti-regmi"></a></section><section><p>32 reviews19 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4040086444">July 3, 2021</a></section><div><p><b>All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation — it is the Self escaping into the open. No writer long remains incognito.</b><p>To review, the book is an amazingly curated edition that has scored well in the attempt of presenting vital things in a concise and clear manner. </p><p>And, here are some of my prime takeaways from the book.</p><p>•	Unnecessary emphasis of a sentence is never the demand.<br />•	The word <i>but</i> when trailed after doubt or help turns needless.<br />•	Data is and always were data.<br />•	Avoid however at the start of a sentence, they tend to fit better when placed in between.<br />•	The habit of adding the suffix -ize into a noun in order to create a verb is responsible for making one ignorant regarding the already present words.<br />•	“One of the” is a feeble writing formula. Cut it and find a precise orientation.<br />•	Facts require no advance billing.<br />•	Do not be tempted by a fancy word when there is already a handy word.<br />•	The best spelling is the one that is regarded as orthodox today.<br />•	Writing style matters as it is what overpowers emotions into the words.<br />•	Revise &amp; Rewrite, but do not overwrite. </p><p>I am absolutely glad to have read this book.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/33720863-will-ransohoff"></a></section><section><p>64 reviews17 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1596289845">December 31, 2016</a></section><div><p>It's a little prescriptive, but this book's advice is solid. The fourth chapter was actually fun to read because parts of it came across as a long, pompous rant.<p>"To say, "Hopefully I'll leave on the noon plane" is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you'll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you'll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven't said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense."</p><p>Hopefully I don't run into Strunk or White on the street; they would really hate how I usually talk and write. There is some great advice about writing forcefully and concisely in this book, and at a hundred pages it's well worth the time.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/33720863?shelf=found-at-bookstores">found-at-bookstores</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/33720863?shelf=reference">reference</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/18290192-gisela-hausmann"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>39 books363 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1256299312">April 16, 2015</a></section><div><p>What a great book - a classic. I loved the funny examples (of yore), sentences most of us would not write any longer. Then again, because we would not write them anymore we pay attention, we are tempted to analyze them. Is the book still relevant? You bet!<p>“… show the weakness of the word NOT. Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; he wishes to be told what is. Hence, as a rule, it is better to express even a negative in positive form.</p><p>Not honest ................................dishonest<br />Not important .............................trifling<br />Did not remember...........................forgot<br />Did not pay attention to...................ignored<br />Did not have much confidence in............distrusted…”</p><p>And isn’t it, that we read the words listed on the left side, every day?</p><p>Whoops, make that, "the book's importance and relevance is proven in the fact that that most of us get to read and also write the words listed on the left side, too frequently. </p><p>Highly recommended. </p><p>Gisela Hausmann, author &amp; blogger</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/18290192?shelf=useful-nonfction">useful-nonfction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/10049704-joey"></a></section><section><p>199 reviews46 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/745799694">January 2, 2019</a></section><div><p>I have always wanted to be fluent in English ever since I took to this language. I was inspired by my cousin who was ‘English-era’ and whom I found smart at answering any question I would pose to her. I was even astounded to find out that she always memorized English words with her mini dictionary to be more expressive of her thoughts and feelings. I thought to myself that in doing so could have been the key to becoming proficient in English. Fascinated, I did the same manner; she allowed me to borrow her dictionary, and I committed all the words to memory. When I finished that dictionary, I had proven my hypothesis. Thereafter, not satisfied with the words new to me, I had tried more than two dictionaries until I got nauseated by the words I was trying to take in.<p>But I was in for a rude awakening when I asked myself how I had to speak as impeccably as grammar Nazis do, the phrase I was not yet aware of . Also, at that time, I was envious of a political icon in the Philippines who was admired for her intelligence and oratorical speeches. For sure, whenever I spoke English with great aplomb because of my crystallized knowledge of vocabulary, I must not have been aware of the fact that those people whom I addressed would cringe at my ” Carabao English”. Thanks to my unconscious thirst for learning; I had persevered in reading more English text books,and English became my favorite subject throughout my school life .</p><p>To advance my English skills, I decided to teach Koreans since teaching them seemed like was all the fashion then. Eventually, I got a wrong perception . So, working as an ESL teacher for nine years means I have learned a lot of lessons on English grammar and structures, particularly on effective writing. As a result, I have become confident about my English. My friends would even tag me as a grammar policeman, the title I learned to accept. However, I smashed that delusion because I realized one time that there are people we may not know who suffer from learning disabilities. I believe that disdaining someone’s shortcomings in perfect English is an example of intellectual hubris.</p><p>When I first read The Elements of Style ( second edition) during my teaching career in an international language school, I realized that there were a lot of things I still had not known. Also, it dawned on me that not all the information I had learned was correct. Consequently, I had this ” grammatical crisis”, the same as the law term ” constitutional crisis” when a government agency is unable to function effectively because of the ambiguous and illogical application of the law. However, I was not too scholarly to acknowledge the points of the book, for I preferred to believe the authority of the authors whose books I had relied on for so many years. It was as though I had disposed of the book down the gutter and chose to remain incorrigible. intransigent, and denial. It was just as well that I read its pdf.</p><p>When I got this book for its third edition, I already felt like looking to a panel of experts on the English language or a faculty of teachers who have been dedicated to teaching English to non-native speakers for some enlightenment . There were some grammar parts I was discombobulated about. ( William Strunk would be shuddering at my using this adjective.) Eventually, I realized that the authors, two versus the authors I look up to, have the method to their madness.</p><p>The book is divided into five parts which steered clear of my blissful ignorance: Elementary Usage of Rules, Elementary Principles of Composition, A Few Matters of Form , Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, and An Approach to Style.</p><p>The first part Elementary Usage of Rules shattered my world again when I revisited some wrong grammatical information I disregarded before:</p><p># 1. I must not use an apostrophe (‘) if the proper noun ends with s.</p><p>Ever since I opened the first English textbook I read (that was a poignant memory), I learned that I can use an apostrophe (‘) even if the proper noun ends with s. That book is even supported by standardized English test books studied by non-native speakers.</p><p>#2. No comma should separate a noun from a restrictive form of identification.</p><p>I am now too old to remember this basic fact. Punctuation marks like comma and dash used for appositive phrases should be to blame for my confusion.</p><p>#3 When the connective is and , the comma should be omitted if the relation between the two statements is close or immediate.</p><p>Finally, I am clear about this rule. I had been bothered if I’d rather separate two independent clauses using FANBOYS than combining then with the same subject of the sentences.</p><p>#4 .The book points out that it is a blunder when we use a singular verb form in a relative clause following” one of …’</p><p>Another grammar point that I have been confused about until now. Basically, most grammar books I have read argue that it is correct to use both singular and plural verb forms. However, they prefer using the singular verb form in a sense that one of…refers to a singular noun excluding itself from the group.</p><p>My favorite part of the book is Elementary Principles of Composition. Although I have learned most of the tips on effective writing several times,I am exhilarated by their emphatic significance. Sometimes, I don’t give a hoot when some professional writers are constantly reminding me of them, but now it is about time I took their advice. Besides, there are some bad writing habits I should really break:</p><p>#1.Brevity and concise. My writing style is kind of digression most of the time. I believe so.</p><p>#2. Statements should be put in positive form. I am in the habit of writing statements with doubt not necessarily because I want to assert my opinions . I always believe that I should not insist something invalid and unreliable since there are many beholders in the universe. I’d rather leave my audience up in the air and find the answers themselves.</p><p>#3. Use definite , specific, concrete language. I agree with the authors of the book that the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. Sometimes, my general statements obscure my main points. Kinda words salad.</p><p># 4 .Omit needless words. Here I am again. I love injecting non-essential clauses.</p><p>#5. An article or a preposition applying to all the members of a series must either be used only before the first term of a series must either be used only before the first term or else be repeated before each term.</p><p>Gee, I was right when a professor corrected my sentence before because I followed this rule.</p><p>#6 . In summaries, keep to one tense</p><p>This is the rule I want to share with my friends who have been puzzled by what tense they should use in summarizing dramas, poems, novels, or stories. The book suggests that we use the present tense or the past tense. If we want to make the story or drama sound natural, we can stick to the past tense form.</p><p>I also enjoyed A Few Matters of Form. I just learned from this part that most dates and numbers are best spelled out in dialogues. Also, since I am into blogging, I should omit initial A or The from titles when I place the possessive form before them. Awesome!</p><p>Words and Expressions Commonly Misused discusses the correct words and expressions I have reviewed several times, and I should not complicate anymore. For example, we can simply use whether instead of as to whether or yet not as yet. The book also suggests the words acceptable to writing which in effect failed to provide justifiable reasons such as at this at this moment not currently; because of not due to ; enthusiastic not enthuse , in regards to not as regards, insightful not perceptive . In addition, the book expresses distaste for our acute habit of using the words and phrases we have thought to be part of normal communication such as one of the most , relate to , respectively , the foreseeable future, utilize , very, finalize , hopefully , importantly and so on. Admittedly, I have used most of them in my blog posts many times. (laughs)</p><p>For more lists of words and phrases we must avoid, click here .</p><p>An Approach to Style gives a list of reminders on effective writing. I enjoyed this part because I learned that we can have our own styles of writing, but should consider the elements we should use to make our masterpiece acceptable and vigorous.</p><p>The Guardian and Time magazine considered The Elements of Style one of the most influential non-fiction of all time. It is sort of like a bible for all English teachers and writers. Thus, the major impacts it had on me , aside from the correct English grammar and structures, are the growing realization that English is not the basis of intelligence at all , but we should never stop learning if we want to be better at this language . Besides, this acts as another catalysts for my insatiable desire for becoming a good writer in the foreseeable future- the time expression repulsed William Strunk Jr. and E.B White. (laughs)</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2044060-blake"></a></section><section><p>195 reviews36 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/101067151">July 15, 2020</a></section><div><p>Had I read this a year ago, happily under the spell of grammar nazism, I might have filled this little review with the kind of gleaming praise and happy diligence of the awakened; however, in the past year I was compelled to take up a few contemporary grammar and style guides and subsequently have developed a sore throat around these pills. I spit them out.<p>My grammar is not sparkling, nor even prone to an occasional gloss shimmer; nonetheless, a book of this sort does little to help the sheen. Its voice is commanding and the pressing of its commands outright to the reader leaves little space for compromise. The authority it has gained thereby, and particularly over young writers and students, is somewhat unnerving in its potential. It is troubling, in particular and general, that the book's tidiness comes at the cost of elaboration. A command is short and to the point, but it is not explicative. There are a few exceptions in which the categoricity of these commands is spelled out for the reader, but in most cases we are left alone with the word. So in these circumstances there is no knowing those rules that are worth following from those that are not.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2044060?shelf=grammar">grammar</a></ul></section></section></article></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 The Elements of Style

 William Strunk Jr. , E.B. White

 4.18
 80,789 ratings 4,418 reviews
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 This style manual offers practical advice on improving writing skills. Throughout, the emphasis is on promoting a plain English style. This little book can help you communicate more effectively by showing you how to enliven your sentences.
 Genres Writing Nonfiction Reference Language Classics Education Self Help
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 105 pages, Hardcover

 First published January 1, 1918

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 William Strunk Jr.

 80 books 245 followers
 William Strunk Jr. was a professor of English at Cornell University and, together with E.B. White , author of The Elements of Style (1918).

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 4.18
 80,789 ratings 4,418 reviews
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 Patricia
 132 reviews 18 followers
 Read
 February 23, 2010
 This book is good for the following things:

 1. Propping up a short table leg

 2. Lining a bird cage

 3. Building a fire

 4. Using as a coaster for cold drinks



 I devoted some of my grammar thesis to criticizing this book, and it was time well spent.


 Geoff Nunberg may have said it best: "The weird thing is to see rules like these passed down as traditional linguistic wisdom. Take that edict that you ought to say "10 persons" rather than "10 people." You can still find it in the recent editions of Strunk and White's revered Elements of Style, along with antique admonitions against saying "contact us" or calling something "worthwhile." The linguist Arnold Zwicky calls these zombie rules. Somebody should have run them through a wood chipper long ago, but here we are in 2010 assigning students a style guide that tells them that correct English requires them to write, "There were 5,000 screaming persons at the Lady Gaga concert." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...

 english
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 Robin Hobb
 Author 272 books 96.3k followers
 June 5, 2021
 Yes. This is a very good book for anyone who wants to write anything.

 Of course, you can break any rule when you are writing. But I believe that is more effective when you know the rule you are breaking, and you know why you are breaking it.

 No matter if you are writing a high school book report or a novel, familiarity with these old fashioned guide to writing can be helpful.

 I recommend it for any writer's reference shelf.
 essential-references
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 Patrick Gibson
 818 reviews 66 followers
 July 18, 2009
 I remember, my Freshman year, sitting in the Music Building lounge waiting for my next class when Maryanne came crashing in, with an appropriate amount of chaos, announcing to all “Oh crap, I can’t find my Strunk and White.” Everyone else in the room apparently knew what she was talking about, but I sat with a blank stare. A few weeks latter my required English 101 professor insisted we hit the bookstore and buy ‘The Elements of Style.’ We were to treat it like the Holy Grail of grammar, carry it with us at all times, sleep with it, and consider it our eternal faithful lover. This would become the first of many copies of Strunk & White that have come and gone in my life. I think at one time I actually had four copies. Maryanne, made a similar pontification in the same lounge a month later “Oh no, I have lost my Boosey & Hawkes”* which I did understand. It may have sounded more erotic than Strunk & White but certainly less dramatic. For me Boosies and Hawksies came and went, but Strunks and Whites have remained constant.

 This year, for my birthday, I received yet another copy. Only this edition is hardback and Illustrated! At first I thought: how queer can this be? It has got to be a mistake. It’s a grammar book! This had to be a novel, a book on fashion, or something sharing a name. Nope. Same Strunk & White – only this time with pictures.

 Over the years, I have acquired other books on grammar (even one on Pittsburgh diction—go figure) but none can compare. The Elements of Style is concise, easy to understand and practically perfect. It’s the best. Ever.

 And a very clever artist has figured out how to illustrate sentence fragments, misused words, the hyphen, participle phrases and lots of other teeth gritting English stumbling blocks—in a very Magritte sort of way.

 Yet, there is one thing, even the most excellent book, won’t be able to do, as, my friends will attest, and this, would be, comma abuse, of which, I am the Master.

 *It’s a Music Publisher
 nerdboy
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 Lisa of Troy
 376 reviews 2,811 followers
 February 3, 2023
 Lisa of Troy Takes on Two Prestigious Literary Heavyweights

 Round One

 Ding! Ding!

 When I was in high school, my Spanish teacher frightened me to the point where I wouldn’t speak. It was one of those situations where you internally plead, “Please don’t call on me. Please don’t call on me.” Of course, disaster struck. During one class, I got something in my eye. Tears were streaming down my face. The other students noticed and essentially crowd-surfed me up to the front of the class, explaining the situation in rapid fire Spanish. After nearly 20 years, I still remember this experience so vividly.

 This fear-based environment profoundly impacted my Spanish skills in a negative way.

 Do you want to know when I learned the most Spanish?

 When I was at university, I met two native Spanish speaking students – one from Mexico and one from Venezuela. We would learn from each other. We would talk in a mixture of Spanish and English, discussing things like to how order from Subway when you didn’t know the name of all of the toppings (ultimately, we settled on using words like “this”, “that”, and pointing). My learning extended beyond dated textbooks, and I learned slang, swear words, and listened to music in Spanish for fun. Soon I even started dreaming in Spanish. There wasn’t a person of authority, no “I’m-better-than-you.” We learned from each other, and we unlocked worlds by doing so.

 This book transported me back into Spanish class.

 If Charlotte’s Web is a hug, The Elements of Style is a punch in the face.

 Although the authors have passion and enthusiasm, this book lacks kindness, basic respect, and empathy. The authors write in such a conceited tone as if they are talking to peasants.

 Shall we look at some examples? Strunk/EB White in italics below.

 Colloquialisms. If you use a colloquialism or slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better.

 Enthuse. An annoying verb growing out of the noun enthusiasm. Not recommended.

 I am not enthused by the authors’ pompous demeanor.

 Finalize. A pompous ambiguous verb.

 Is this the author’s favorite word then?

 Meaningful. A bankrupt adjective. Choose another, or rephrase.

 Prestigious. Often an adjective of last resort. It’s in the dictionary, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it.

 He says that you are illiterate if you don’t know that inflammable means combustible.

 The truth is…The fact is…A bad beginning for a sentence. If you feel you are possessed of the truth, or of the fact, simply state it. Do not give it advance billing.

 Extreme disagree! The truth is always perks up my ears. What is the truth? What is the point?

 This shame-based education should be a thing of the past.

 Do not affect a breezy manner.

 Terrible advice. What I loved so much about Project Hail Mary is that I felt like one of my nerdy friends was having a conversation with me. Rick Riordan in the Percy Jackson series took some classic Greek mythology, modernized the language, and retold the myths in an unpretentious, interesting way, making them his own.

 In ordinary composition, use orthodox spelling. Do not write nite for night, thru for through, pleez for please, unless you plan to introduce a complete system of simplified spelling and are prepared to take the consequences.

 Stay in your lane, Strunk, telling me what I can and cannot write! This paper is my canvas. As the painter, there are no limits. My creativity isn’t bounded. If I want to say, “Good nite, my readers!” who cares? Maybe it will wake some people up. Why can’t I use magic in my writing? Why can’t I make up words or spelling, stretching myself, pushing readers to think outside the box?

 Overly stuffy and formal writing and expecting strict compliance to a rigid set of rules is paralyzing.

 The truth is that plot, character, and setting as well as using appropriate sentence and paragraph length are more important than using a few words correctly. In fact, I have already violated several of the rules of The Elements of Style in this review.

 Avoid foreign language. It is a bad habit. Write in English.

 What about carpe diem? Seize the day? Readers are smart. Treat them as such.

 Avoid fancy words. Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready, and able.

 Isn’t that one of the beauties of reading? Ordinarily, our vocabulary is limited to a certain set of words in our everyday usage; however, when you read you get to dust off those fancy words, words that you recognize but you don’t often use when you speak. When I encounter a fancy word, I feel like when I am walking along a beach and find an amazing seashell. The fancy words are beautiful treasures.

 For example, take the first sentence from His Dark Materials by my favorite author, Philip Pullman:

 Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.

 Darkening is not a word that I normally say out loud, but I really enjoyed it in this sentence. Of course, fancy words should be balanced. If I attempted to use the thesaurus to change every single word into something more sophisticated, the sentence would sound ridiculous and take away from the storytelling.

 Do not inject opinion.

 Is this guy joking? This is classic, “Do as I say and not as I do.”

 No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.

 Who proofread this? The entire book is distrustful of the reader and is patronizing. Also, you don’t need a comma between “intelligence” and “or.” What kind of grammar book is this?

 Time for street justice. Who won: Lisa of Troy or Strunk/EB White? Put your “two cents” in the comments!

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 J.G. Keely
 546 reviews 9,422 followers
 December 26, 2014
 There must be some structure to language. We must agree on some aspects of it, and creating rules and definitions around those mutual agreements helps to foster intelligibility throughout the language.

 Likewise, this agreement to abide by these rules means that we can teach communication. This does not mean only in the case of children, but it certainly simplifies it for them. This also means that writers can continue to learn, to interact, and to write understandably and not wastefully.

 We take these rules from traditions, but also from common sense. Strunk's rulings on word use (especially amongst words with similar meanings) are based on the root words, and the original meanings. Strunk means to separate these similar words so that instead of synonyms, we have two similar but precise words.

 This also prevents confusion, as various English dialects may take these words in different ways, but all share the same roots.

 However, language changes constantly, so regulating it and placing rules on it is difficult. Many feel that it stifles creativity, or that it places hegemonic power in the hands of the elite. One benefit of this regulation is that we can read Shakespeare today with little trouble.

 Dictionaries came into popularity around the time of Shakespeare, as did the study of philology. We have more trouble reading Chaucer, even though only two-hundred years separate Chaucer and Shakespeare, while twice that length separates Shakespeare from us.

 The work of Strunk and White is not to close off language, nor to set it absolutely free, but to make a linguistic analysis of its forms, meanings and changes, but one that the layman can appreciate. The work is somewhat dated by today's standards, but this actually provides the perfect example for many of the book's observations on the mutability of language.

 It likewise supports the assertion that language may change, but not as much as you might think. Strunk and White is just as useful to an author today as it was when it was compiled.

 It is light-hearted and often humorous, and presents language and communication in a thoughtful way. Any writer should come away from this book with a new respect for language, and with a keener eye for seeing their own writing.

 While the book sometimes seems severe in its regulations, this is only because misuse is so rampant and so ugly. Similarly, someone might tell you "under no circumstances should you balance on a chair on the edge of the roof of a ten story building". This rule is perfectly reasonable, despite the fact that some well-trained, adventurous individuals are quite capable of this feat.

 The fact remains that for the majority, violating these simple rules will result in an unsightly mess. A talented and experienced writer can flaunt and even break the rules when it suits him. The greatest writers do, and this book gives examples of how and why they do it.

 However, rules are how we create meaning. Whether you follow them or break them, you must know them and understand how they work in order to communicate to your reader. You cannot subvert and idea unless you understand it, and you cannot communicate anything to your reader that doesn't have a basis in their experiences and understanding.

 There is no impressive act of creation that is not conscious and considered, because rebellion cannot happen in a void. It's the rule that proves the exception.
 non-fiction reference reviewed
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 David
 865 reviews 1,271 followers
 March 2, 2011
 In her charming essay, "Insert a Carrot", Anne Fadiman describes a trait shared by everyone in her family - a heightened sensitivity to the flaws in other people's writing. The Fadimans all belong to that tribe whose members cannot read without simultaneously copy-editing. When dining out, they amuse each other by pointing out typos on the menu. It might seem obnoxious, but really they just can't help it. If you're blessed with the copy-editing gene you can't just switch it off.

 I have the same problem. When I read, typographical and grammatical errors leap off the page, assailing my eyeballs, demanding to be noticed. A distraction that I am incapable of ignoring, they hijack my attention and diminish my respect for the author. I want my own writing to be free of such distractions; it should be forceful and persuasive. I welcome constructive advice that helps me attain that goal. My copy of "Modern American Usage" is grubby and well-thumbed. I think its author, Bryan A. Garner, has accomplished something quite remarkable. He has written a usage guide that gives writers clear, concrete, reasoned advice, without being overly dogmatic or erring on the side of sloppiness. I hate sloppy writing.

 I also hate Strunk and White. Its popularity is inexplicable to me. Here are just a few of my objections:

 1. Their famous motto, "Omit needless words", is fatuous and has absolutely no practical value. (If I knew how to do this, I'd already be some kind of great communication guru.) Repeating this essentially vapid advice in similarly empty formulations like "Be clear" and "Don't explain too much" is of no practical help to anybody, and suggests that even the authors have difficulty in deciphering their own admonitions.

 2. The stylistic tips that are not simply platitudinous are often just silly, hopelessly vague, or reflective of the long outdated prejudices of a couple of old white dudes.

 For example -

 Do not inject opinion.
 Prefer the standard to the offbeat.
 Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.
 Write with nouns and verbs.
 Don't construct awkward adverbs.
 Avoid fancy words.
 Use figures of speech sparingly.
 Do not overwrite.

 Having trouble figuring out whether your ear is "good", your adverb is "awkward", or your writing is "over"? Good luck with that. S & W will be of no help whatsoever. Why not?

 3. The examples used to illustrate "bad" style in the book are generally ludicrously bad. The need for correction is so glaringly obvious that the examples have little instructive value. The authors are well able to demolish straw men, but if you want advice on a subtle point, they are unlikely to be of any practical help.

 4. The fetishistic obsession with avoiding the passive voice is (a) baffling (b) profoundly irritating when some freaking paperclip starts to lecture you about it (c) so obviously idiotic that the authors themselves ignore it throughout the book.

 Other questionable decrees include the ukase that "none" should always take a singular verb, the prohibition on starting a sentence with "however", and the pointless "which/that" discussion.

 These exemplify one of the book's biggest problems, which - to be fair - is not necessarily the authors' fault. It has achieved the status of a kind of sacred text, with all of the problems that result. People become blind to the internal inconsistencies within the text, it gets quoted with the kind of self-righteous zeal characteristic to "true believers" and to similar ends. Instead of stimulating thoughtful discussion, S & W is wielded as a weapon to end it. Which might not be so terrible if the advice it contains were not so vague, idiosyncratic and frequently inconsistent. Probably the most infuriating aspect of writing our book was my co-author's continual invocation of Strunk and White as the final arbiter. One can only wonder by whose authority these two gentlemen were anointed God.

 In a cunning marketing gimmick, the latest edition of Strunk and White has been jazzed up by including illustrations by Maira Kalman. Ms Kalman is a delightful artist, whose work elsewhere I greatly admire. But she really should have said no to this particular project. Her illustrations are occasionally pretty, sometimes baffling, but generally pointless. They add no particular insight, though some readers may find them a welcome distraction from the barked eccentricities of the book's two main authors.



 words-and-language
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 Leonard Gaya
 Author 1 book 809 followers
 April 16, 2020
 “It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric”, says professor Strunk. The old fart was probably referring to his students at Cornell University. The Elements of Style is indeed a dusty textbook (1918), but still widely in use today. It aims at providing a set of rules and tips on how to write properly, if not elegantly. Stephen King, in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft , strongly recommends this book to any aspiring fiction writer.

 In truth, such rules as, for instance, the pre-eminence of the active over the passive voice, or the superiority of the positive over the negative mode in a sentence (which, at the time, were perhaps not as evident), have become the sesame of communication, advocated at school, in business and even in spelling and grammar software.

 Some of Strunk’s remarks are amusing, sarcastic even, like this one on the use of the word Nature : “Often vaguely used in such expressions as “a lover of nature;” “poems about nature.” Unless more specific statements follow, the reader cannot tell whether the poems have to do with natural scenery, rural life, the sunset, the untracked wilderness, or the habits of squirrels.”

 While this hodgepodge of rules is at best a bit arbitrary and, at worst, quite outdated, the core of it all is to prompt students to write boldly, confidently, legibly, with crispness and vigour, and avoid fizzling out with sloppy writing — nothing wrong about that.
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 Kenny
 Author 22 books 47 followers
 October 14, 2007
 The gold standard. No more need be said than to quote Mr. Strunk's thoughts under the headline "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. This requires not that the reader make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell ."

 And every word of Mr. Strunk's (as updated and expanded by the brilliant and self-effacing E.B. White) indeed does tell.

 Don't touch your keyboard without reading this book!
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 Roy Lotz
 Author 1 book 8,093 followers
 March 15, 2021
 I still remember, and will always remember, my 11th grade English class. Before that year, English class had meant little more than vocabulary tests, book reports, and those five-paragraph (hamburger) essays. But this class was different. Our teacher was not interested in getting us to pass a standardized test; instead, she wanted to really teach us how to read and write.

 To my astonishment, I realized that nobody had ever done that before. I had been taught how to write a five-paragraph essay, but not how to write. I had been taught how to pass tests on books, but not how to read them. Writing formulaic essays and passing multiple-choice tests requires certain skills: brute memorization and learning by rote. But reading and writing require something much different: a sensitivity to the written word. Integral to developing this sensitivity was reading this slim volume.

 The Elements of Style is normally billed as a kind of guidebook or instruction manual—these are the rules of grammar; these are the rules of style: follow them and you will produce good writing. And, indeed, this is how the book is formatted. But half of Strunk’s rules of grammar and usage are hopelessly outdated; the other half will probably be outdated in another fifty years. What’s more, how can anyone hope to encapsulate ‘good style’, since highly respected authors have written an enormous variety of styles?

 No; the value of this book lies neither in its rules of grammar nor of style. It is valuable because Strunk and White cherish language. Consider this quote: “The colon has more effect than the comma, less power to separate than the semicolon, and more formality than the dash.” Now, this may or may not be true; I’m not saying it isn’t. My point is that, regardless, what’s important is Strunk’s attitude—that he cared deeply enough about writing to sit down and describe the feelings evoked by punctuation. To my high school self, this was beyond belief.

 Strunk felt that writing was about communication—getting your point across fully without wasting the reader’s time. Say what you will about him, he was not a hypocrite; this little book can be read in one sitting. In fact, so fully does this book live up to its author’s ideals, that the reader gets a full dose of his personality. When reading Strunk's taut bullet points—“Put statements into positive form!” “Omit needless words!”—you can almost hear him yelling them in a crowded classroom—his voice harsh and nasal, his skin pale, his face cleanly shaven, wearing a tweed jacket and tapping the lectern with an open palm.

 “Omit needless words!” he says again, this time with a slight grin. And with that grin, you both realize the obvious: that he’s secretly thankful for all the writers who don’t abide by his principles; otherwise, he would have nothing to be grumpy about.

 The point is not that you write this way or that; the point is that you care about the way you choose.
 help-me-help-myself highly-recommended-favorites prose-style
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 Daniel Cowan
 6 reviews 4 followers
 June 20, 2019
 This is a wonderful book for beginning writers to use as a guide. It cleary spells out the rules of English grammar, and provides examples to explain each guideline. I highly recommend this little gem! I bought this book at special price from here:
 https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style...
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 Richard Derus
 2,855 reviews 1,888 followers
 December 24, 2016
 Rating: 5* of five

 The essential guide to HOW to write! How much better to start with a guide to achieving an effect you're looking for.
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 David
 Author 17 books 333 followers
 April 21, 2013
 It is very good for what it does, which is advise on how to write clearly and concisely. But generations of writers have completely misunderstood its purpose and used it as a Bible of Good Writing. It's not. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum has famously gone on something of a crusade against The Elements of Style , and while he makes good points, it may be a little unfair to blame S&W for the fact that writers don't realize the original authors were addressing an audience of barely-literate college students. If you are a fiction writer, S&W's advice should be taken with a very large grain of salt — if you try to write novels using The Elements of Style as your guide, you will probably write very cleanly and correctly but very badly.
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 L.S. Popovich
 Author 2 books 306 followers
 March 12, 2020
 Many other books on writing are not as directly helpful as this one. I have made every mistake a human being can make while writing. I'm making mistakes right now. Improvement is a lifelong process. This readable and referenceable book is one to keep in the desk drawer, to peruse before and after writing.

 Aside from the argument that the English language is sliding toward less standardization, many editors, agents, publishers and readers demand or expect PhD-level grammar (whatever that equates to). But it really should not take years of reading and diagramming sentences to put words together in a satisfactory fashion.

 If you have tried other how-to-write books, I'd set them aside until you've finished this one. This may contain all you need to know in a much smaller bundle. As a rule, I am not a fan of criticism. I could pick apart most pieces of writing. You could pick apart most of what I write. It's human nature to seek out flaws. In order to write competitively, writers must arm themselves against critics. But even more than that, communication benefits from clarity and articulation. I feel that a close study of this book will elevate a writer's awareness of certain flaws. These flaws pass most of us by without notice. But they can also undermine an otherwise excellent piece of writing.

 Wouldn't we all like to write at a level where grammar is no longer part of the equation, where each sentence unfurls from the pen with the pithy lightning strike of Oscar Wilde's polished prose, on the first draft of course, where we can excavate the furthest reaches of our imagination and mind without regard to "should the comma go here, or here?" But I am not sure if such a state of nirvana exists. Revision never ends.

 In summary, I recommend picking up this book. I trust it much more than those bloggers (paid by the word) posting "Helpful Tips."
 2020 5-star nonfiction
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 Tassa DeSalada
 Author 12 books 271 followers
 May 30, 2019
 This small book is a mountain of good writing advice!
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 Lusy
 17 reviews 16 followers
 July 3, 2022




 To quote Stephen King in the foreword of his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft : " I figured the shorter the book, the less the nonsense*. One notable exception to the nonsense* rule is The Element of Styles, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. There is little or no detectable nonsense* in that book. "

 I agree with that statement!

 This book is not perfect so of course it's got some errors. However, there are reasons this is considered one of the most important books on writing. The fact that it stands the test of time since its first publication in 1918 also goes to show how helpful it's been to a lot of people.

 I based my review on my own experiences and observations. From what I can see, the main lesson for most people I know who have read this book is 'omit needless words' which is good and might be music to an editor's ears but it's more than that to me! It shows how clear thinking will produce clear writing which is a great deal in communicating a message to others.

 Every time I revisit it, I'm reminded of not only how much I can learn from my past mistakes but also how much more I need to know in order to improve myself. It's a very humbling learning experience! The playful and vibrant illustrations by Maira Kalman in this edition also make learning from this book more enjoyable and fun.

 Knowing the elements of our writing style will help us express our voices better. Like someone dear to me used to say: To live is to serve. In the end, if the expression of our voices is clear, so much so that it can help others find their voices as well? Then that's all that matters!





 * = edited words
 Picture credit: unsplash.com
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 -,-
 Author 0 books 249 followers
 November 3, 2016
 Write to-day, to-night, to-morrow (but not together) with hyphen.

 Write any one, every one, some one, some time (except the sense of formerly) as two words.

 Thanking you in advance. This sounds as if the writer meant, "It will not be worth my while to write to you again." Simply write, "Thanking you," and if the favor which you have requested is granted, write a letter of acknowledgment.

 #Life-Writing-Lessons!


 100-pages
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 Meredith (Slowly Catching Up)
 771 reviews 12.1k followers
 March 11, 2015
 I find this book fascinating, especially when comparing it to modern style guides. While it won't become my go to when working with students, I consider it a valuable resource.
 first-reads
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 Simon Fay
 Author 4 books 154 followers
 July 10, 2017
 As a couple of reviewers have mentioned, Elements of Style has become somewhat out of style. There are plenty of people who stand by it as a trusted source for all things grammar, but I imagine even diehard supporters will grudgingly admit that the standards it established have led to some truly convoluted sentences.

 Even so, I still recommend it as a handy pocketbook for anybody who's interested in the craft of writing. When I originally read it a number of years ago, I was a little strict in following the rules it outlined. It had a negative impact on my writing. But as I outgrew some of the habits it taught me, I began to think of it more as a leap off point for amateur wordsmiths, a sturdy foundation for beginners to build their own style on.

 Yes, there are probably more up to date guides on grammar and writing, but I haven't read those, so my rating for this book exists in a vacuum of sorts: It's a good manual if you take it as the beginning of wisdom, not the end. Most importantly, the material is simple and engaging. The examples and logic are straightforward. And at the very least it will get you playing with the English language.
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 Amir Tesla
 161 reviews 655 followers
 August 13, 2020
 This is an essential book on the basic principles of a good writing style.
 A must-read for anyone who aspires to be a serious writer. (Stephan King)
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 Eric
 68 reviews 1 follower
 January 3, 2009
 I never thought I would say this about a book, but every writer needs to read this book. Hell, if you plan on writing anything you should read this book. The title is very misleading. Anyone who came across it for the first time might think it was a book about "style" as an artform. For those who are worried about the pedantry of writing, this book is mostly about grammar and what can be more effective in using the English language. This needs to be in the curriculumn for high schools, especially now when grammar is being forgotten so that people can e-mail and sound stupid on myspace. I only had two bones to pick with this book: First, I thought a comment E.B. White made in terms of using only "he" instead of "she" as a universal antecedent for sentences that may begin, "One must watch his/her step," is a bit off for somebody who studies language. On one hand we have someone in love with language who agrees with Strunk that student body should be replaced with studentry, and on the other hand White is giving in to gender roles within language. A bit silly, and as many readers might have picked recognized, writing books have "she" in a lot of them. Second, White made a comment about not using a foreign language in a work which, though I agree can be confusing, can still be pulled off. The way it came across was distasteful. But those are perhaps just comments on what I might feel about White as a person and not as a writer or teacher. Get this book!
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 Ulysse
 264 reviews 90 followers
 July 2, 2022
 Settantatré

 There was a small book by Strunk & White
 A book that I read in just one night
 Its style so simple
 Like a smile or a dimple
 Has led me to think I can’t write

 A sinistra... / A destra...


 .
 2018 books-that-inspire-limericks essays-nonfiction
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 da AL
 360 reviews 359 followers
 April 10, 2021
 Who knew a book about grammar could be so entertaining & useful? And Frank McCourt is the perfect choice to perform the audiobook!
 audio-books non-fiction
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 Clumsy Storyteller
 348 reviews 729 followers
 October 23, 2018
 Very helpful for young authors. And should be read more than once.
 definitely-worth-reading favorites non-fiction
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 Dannii Elle
 1,966 reviews 1,385 followers
 November 22, 2016
 I find it very impressive that this was written almost one hundred years ago and still remains so relevant and revered today.

 The book does exactly what the title suggests – covers stylistic elements of the English language. Each rule covered has multiple examples attached to it for proficient understanding and it managed to be both highly informative, whilst offering me nothing new. This is certainly of great practical help in academic writing, but I found it rather lacking for my current desires.

 I listened to this in audiobook form and I don't think it was really suited towards that format. The information was relayed in a dry and uninspiring style that felt a little repetitive and I could feel my attention dwindling as I attempted to process the over-abundance of information. The grammatical advice was not new to me, which allowed my attention to drift further, and I think I would have more appreciation for this if I had discovered it sooner.

 This covers the basic grammatical and stylistic principles of good academic writing and I feel it is a good starter manual for any budding writer. Unfortunately, I was expecting something different going into this and it wasn't exactly what I was currently looking for.
 adult-books-read authorial-advice non-fiction-nuances
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 Prakriti Regmi
 32 reviews 19 followers
 July 3, 2021
 All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation — it is the Self escaping into the open. No writer long remains incognito.

 To review, the book is an amazingly curated edition that has scored well in the attempt of presenting vital things in a concise and clear manner.

 And, here are some of my prime takeaways from the book.

 • Unnecessary emphasis of a sentence is never the demand.
 • The word but when trailed after doubt or help turns needless.
 • Data is and always were data.
 • Avoid however at the start of a sentence, they tend to fit better when placed in between.
 • The habit of adding the suffix -ize into a noun in order to create a verb is responsible for making one ignorant regarding the already present words.
 • “One of the” is a feeble writing formula. Cut it and find a precise orientation.
 • Facts require no advance billing.
 • Do not be tempted by a fancy word when there is already a handy word.
 • The best spelling is the one that is regarded as orthodox today.
 • Writing style matters as it is what overpowers emotions into the words.
 • Revise & Rewrite, but do not overwrite.

 I am absolutely glad to have read this book.
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 Will Ransohoff
 64 reviews 17 followers
 December 31, 2016
 It's a little prescriptive, but this book's advice is solid. The fourth chapter was actually fun to read because parts of it came across as a long, pompous rant.

 "To say, "Hopefully I'll leave on the noon plane" is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you'll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you'll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven't said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense."

 Hopefully I don't run into Strunk or White on the street; they would really hate how I usually talk and write. There is some great advice about writing forcefully and concisely in this book, and at a hundred pages it's well worth the time.
 found-at-bookstores reference
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 Gisela Hausmann
 Author 39 books 363 followers
 April 16, 2015
 What a great book - a classic. I loved the funny examples (of yore), sentences most of us would not write any longer. Then again, because we would not write them anymore we pay attention, we are tempted to analyze them. Is the book still relevant? You bet!

 “… show the weakness of the word NOT. Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; he wishes to be told what is. Hence, as a rule, it is better to express even a negative in positive form.

 Not honest ................................dishonest
 Not important .............................trifling
 Did not remember...........................forgot
 Did not pay attention to...................ignored
 Did not have much confidence in............distrusted…”

 And isn’t it, that we read the words listed on the left side, every day?

 Whoops, make that, "the book's importance and relevance is proven in the fact that that most of us get to read and also write the words listed on the left side, too frequently.

 Highly recommended.

 Gisela Hausmann, author & blogger
 useful-nonfction
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 Kellyn Roth
 Author 24 books 832 followers
 June 19, 2017
 Admittedly, I use the dictionary a lot less than this little book.
 nonfiction-books read-for-school writing-how-to
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 Joey
 199 reviews 46 followers
 January 2, 2019
 I have always wanted to be fluent in English ever since I took to this language. I was inspired by my cousin who was ‘English-era’ and whom I found smart at answering any question I would pose to her. I was even astounded to find out that she always memorized English words with her mini dictionary to be more expressive of her thoughts and feelings. I thought to myself that in doing so could have been the key to becoming proficient in English. Fascinated, I did the same manner; she allowed me to borrow her dictionary, and I committed all the words to memory. When I finished that dictionary, I had proven my hypothesis. Thereafter, not satisfied with the words new to me, I had tried more than two dictionaries until I got nauseated by the words I was trying to take in.

 But I was in for a rude awakening when I asked myself how I had to speak as impeccably as grammar Nazis do, the phrase I was not yet aware of . Also, at that time, I was envious of a political icon in the Philippines who was admired for her intelligence and oratorical speeches. For sure, whenever I spoke English with great aplomb because of my crystallized knowledge of vocabulary, I must not have been aware of the fact that those people whom I addressed would cringe at my ” Carabao English”. Thanks to my unconscious thirst for learning; I had persevered in reading more English text books,and English became my favorite subject throughout my school life .

 To advance my English skills, I decided to teach Koreans since teaching them seemed like was all the fashion then. Eventually, I got a wrong perception . So, working as an ESL teacher for nine years means I have learned a lot of lessons on English grammar and structures, particularly on effective writing. As a result, I have become confident about my English. My friends would even tag me as a grammar policeman, the title I learned to accept. However, I smashed that delusion because I realized one time that there are people we may not know who suffer from learning disabilities. I believe that disdaining someone’s shortcomings in perfect English is an example of intellectual hubris.

 When I first read The Elements of Style ( second edition) during my teaching career in an international language school, I realized that there were a lot of things I still had not known. Also, it dawned on me that not all the information I had learned was correct. Consequently, I had this ” grammatical crisis”, the same as the law term ” constitutional crisis” when a government agency is unable to function effectively because of the ambiguous and illogical application of the law. However, I was not too scholarly to acknowledge the points of the book, for I preferred to believe the authority of the authors whose books I had relied on for so many years. It was as though I had disposed of the book down the gutter and chose to remain incorrigible. intransigent, and denial. It was just as well that I read its pdf.

 When I got this book for its third edition, I already felt like looking to a panel of experts on the English language or a faculty of teachers who have been dedicated to teaching English to non-native speakers for some enlightenment . There were some grammar parts I was discombobulated about. ( William Strunk would be shuddering at my using this adjective.) Eventually, I realized that the authors, two versus the authors I look up to, have the method to their madness.

 The book is divided into five parts which steered clear of my blissful ignorance: Elementary Usage of Rules, Elementary Principles of Composition, A Few Matters of Form , Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, and An Approach to Style.

 The first part Elementary Usage of Rules shattered my world again when I revisited some wrong grammatical information I disregarded before:

 # 1. I must not use an apostrophe (‘) if the proper noun ends with s.

 Ever since I opened the first English textbook I read (that was a poignant memory), I learned that I can use an apostrophe (‘) even if the proper noun ends with s. That book is even supported by standardized English test books studied by non-native speakers.

 #2. No comma should separate a noun from a restrictive form of identification.

 I am now too old to remember this basic fact. Punctuation marks like comma and dash used for appositive phrases should be to blame for my confusion.

 #3 When the connective is and , the comma should be omitted if the relation between the two statements is close or immediate.

 Finally, I am clear about this rule. I had been bothered if I’d rather separate two independent clauses using FANBOYS than combining then with the same subject of the sentences.

 #4 .The book points out that it is a blunder when we use a singular verb form in a relative clause following” one of …’

 Another grammar point that I have been confused about until now. Basically, most grammar books I have read argue that it is correct to use both singular and plural verb forms. However, they prefer using the singular verb form in a sense that one of…refers to a singular noun excluding itself from the group.

 My favorite part of the book is Elementary Principles of Composition. Although I have learned most of the tips on effective writing several times,I am exhilarated by their emphatic significance. Sometimes, I don’t give a hoot when some professional writers are constantly reminding me of them, but now it is about time I took their advice. Besides, there are some bad writing habits I should really break:

 #1.Brevity and concise. My writing style is kind of digression most of the time. I believe so.

 #2. Statements should be put in positive form. I am in the habit of writing statements with doubt not necessarily because I want to assert my opinions . I always believe that I should not insist something invalid and unreliable since there are many beholders in the universe. I’d rather leave my audience up in the air and find the answers themselves.

 #3. Use definite , specific, concrete language. I agree with the authors of the book that the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. Sometimes, my general statements obscure my main points. Kinda words salad.

 # 4 .Omit needless words. Here I am again. I love injecting non-essential clauses.

 #5. An article or a preposition applying to all the members of a series must either be used only before the first term of a series must either be used only before the first term or else be repeated before each term.

 Gee, I was right when a professor corrected my sentence before because I followed this rule.

 #6 . In summaries, keep to one tense

 This is the rule I want to share with my friends who have been puzzled by what tense they should use in summarizing dramas, poems, novels, or stories. The book suggests that we use the present tense or the past tense. If we want to make the story or drama sound natural, we can stick to the past tense form.

 I also enjoyed A Few Matters of Form. I just learned from this part that most dates and numbers are best spelled out in dialogues. Also, since I am into blogging, I should omit initial A or The from titles when I place the possessive form before them. Awesome!

 Words and Expressions Commonly Misused discusses the correct words and expressions I have reviewed several times, and I should not complicate anymore. For example, we can simply use whether instead of as to whether or yet not as yet. The book also suggests the words acceptable to writing which in effect failed to provide justifiable reasons such as at this at this moment not currently; because of not due to ; enthusiastic not enthuse , in regards to not as regards, insightful not perceptive . In addition, the book expresses distaste for our acute habit of using the words and phrases we have thought to be part of normal communication such as one of the most , relate to , respectively , the foreseeable future, utilize , very, finalize , hopefully , importantly and so on. Admittedly, I have used most of them in my blog posts many times. (laughs)

 For more lists of words and phrases we must avoid, click here .

 An Approach to Style gives a list of reminders on effective writing. I enjoyed this part because I learned that we can have our own styles of writing, but should consider the elements we should use to make our masterpiece acceptable and vigorous.

 The Guardian and Time magazine considered The Elements of Style one of the most influential non-fiction of all time. It is sort of like a bible for all English teachers and writers. Thus, the major impacts it had on me , aside from the correct English grammar and structures, are the growing realization that English is not the basis of intelligence at all , but we should never stop learning if we want to be better at this language . Besides, this acts as another catalysts for my insatiable desire for becoming a good writer in the foreseeable future- the time expression repulsed William Strunk Jr. and E.B White. (laughs)
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 Blake
 195 reviews 36 followers
 July 15, 2020
 Had I read this a year ago, happily under the spell of grammar nazism, I might have filled this little review with the kind of gleaming praise and happy diligence of the awakened; however, in the past year I was compelled to take up a few contemporary grammar and style guides and subsequently have developed a sore throat around these pills. I spit them out.

 My grammar is not sparkling, nor even prone to an occasional gloss shimmer; nonetheless, a book of this sort does little to help the sheen. Its voice is commanding and the pressing of its commands outright to the reader leaves little space for compromise. The authority it has gained thereby, and particularly over young writers and students, is somewhat unnerving in its potential. It is troubling, in particular and general, that the book's tidiness comes at the cost of elaboration. A command is short and to the point, but it is not explicative. There are a few exceptions in which the categoricity of these commands is spelled out for the reader, but in most cases we are left alone with the word. So in these circumstances there is no knowing those rules that are worth following from those that are not.
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132 reviews18 followers      Read  February 23, 2010   This book is good for the following things: 1. Propping up a short table leg 2. Lining a bird cage 3. Building a fire 4. Using as a coaster for cold drinks I devoted some of my grammar thesis to criticizing this book, and it was time well spent.  Geoff Nunberg may have said it best: "The weird thing is to see rules like these passed down as traditional linguistic wisdom. Take that edict that you ought to say "10 persons" rather than "10 people." You can still find it in the recent editions of Strunk and White's revered Elements of Style, along with antique admonitions against saying "contact us" or calling something "worthwhile." The linguist Arnold Zwicky calls these zombie rules. Somebody should have run them through a wood chipper long ago, but here we are in 2010 assigning students a style guide that tells them that correct English requires them to write, "There were 5,000 screaming persons at the Lady Gaga concert." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...      english               Author  272 books96.3k followers     June 5, 2021   Yes. This is a very good book for anyone who wants to write anything. Of course, you can break any rule when you are writing. But I believe that is more effective when you know the rule you are breaking, and you know why you are breaking it.  No matter if you are writing a high school book report or a novel, familiarity with these old fashioned guide to writing can be helpful. I recommend it for any writer's reference shelf.     essential-references               818 reviews66 followers     July 18, 2009   I remember, my Freshman year, sitting in the Music Building lounge waiting for my next class when Maryanne came crashing in, with an appropriate amount of chaos, announcing to all “Oh crap, I can’t find my Strunk and White.” Everyone else in the room apparently knew what she was talking about, but I sat with a blank stare. A few weeks latter my required English 101 professor insisted we hit the bookstore and buy ‘The Elements of Style.’ We were to treat it like the Holy Grail of grammar, carry it with us at all times, sleep with it, and consider it our eternal faithful lover. This would become the first of many copies of Strunk &amp; White that have come and gone in my life. I think at one time I actually had four copies. Maryanne, made a similar pontification in the same lounge a month later “Oh no, I have lost my Boosey &amp; Hawkes”* which I did understand. It may have sounded more erotic than Strunk &amp; White but certainly less dramatic. For me Boosies and Hawksies came and went, but Strunks and Whites have remained constant. This year, for my birthday, I received yet another copy. Only this edition is hardback and Illustrated! At first I thought: how queer can this be? It has got to be a mistake. It’s a grammar book! This had to be a novel, a book on fashion, or something sharing a name. Nope. Same Strunk &amp; White – only this time with pictures.  Over the years, I have acquired other books on grammar (even one on Pittsburgh diction—go figure) but none can compare. The Elements of Style is concise, easy to understand and practically perfect. It’s the best. Ever. And a very clever artist has figured out how to illustrate sentence fragments, misused words, the hyphen, participle phrases and lots of other teeth gritting English stumbling blocks—in a very Magritte sort of way. Yet, there is one thing, even the most excellent book, won’t be able to do, as, my friends will attest, and this, would be, comma abuse, of which, I am the Master. *It’s a Music Publisher     nerdboy               376 reviews2,811 followers     February 3, 2023    Lisa of Troy Takes on Two Prestigious Literary Heavyweights Round One Ding! Ding! When I was in high school, my Spanish teacher frightened me to the point where I wouldn’t speak. It was one of those situations where you internally plead, “Please don’t call on me. Please don’t call on me.” Of course, disaster struck. During one class, I got something in my eye. Tears were streaming down my face. The other students noticed and essentially crowd-surfed me up to the front of the class, explaining the situation in rapid fire Spanish. After nearly 20 years, I still remember this experience so vividly. This fear-based environment profoundly impacted my Spanish skills in a negative way. Do you want to know when I learned the most Spanish? When I was at university, I met two native Spanish speaking students – one from Mexico and one from Venezuela. We would learn from each other. We would talk in a mixture of Spanish and English, discussing things like to how order from Subway when you didn’t know the name of all of the toppings (ultimately, we settled on using words like “this”, “that”, and pointing). My learning extended beyond dated textbooks, and I learned slang, swear words, and listened to music in Spanish for fun. Soon I even started dreaming in Spanish. There wasn’t a person of authority, no “I’m-better-than-you.” We learned from each other, and we unlocked worlds by doing so. This book transported me back into Spanish class. If Charlotte’s Web is a hug, The Elements of Style is a punch in the face. Although the authors have passion and enthusiasm, this book lacks kindness, basic respect, and empathy. The authors write in such a conceited tone as if they are talking to peasants. Shall we look at some examples? Strunk/EB White in italics below.  Colloquialisms. If you use a colloquialism or slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better.   Enthuse. An annoying verb growing out of the noun enthusiasm. Not recommended.  I am not enthused by the authors’ pompous demeanor.  Finalize. A pompous ambiguous verb.  Is this the author’s favorite word then?  Meaningful. A bankrupt adjective. Choose another, or rephrase.    Prestigious. Often an adjective of last resort. It’s in the dictionary, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it.  He says that you are illiterate if you don’t know that inflammable means combustible.  The truth is…The fact is…A bad beginning for a sentence. If you feel you are possessed of the truth, or of the fact, simply state it. Do not give it advance billing.  Extreme disagree! The truth is always perks up my ears. What is the truth? What is the point?  This shame-based education should be a thing of the past.   Do not affect a breezy manner.  Terrible advice. What I loved so much about Project Hail Mary is that I felt like one of my nerdy friends was having a conversation with me. Rick Riordan in the Percy Jackson series took some classic Greek mythology, modernized the language, and retold the myths in an unpretentious, interesting way, making them his own.  In ordinary composition, use orthodox spelling. Do not write nite for night, thru for through, pleez for please, unless you plan to introduce a complete system of simplified spelling and are prepared to take the consequences.  Stay in your lane, Strunk, telling me what I can and cannot write! This paper is my canvas. As the painter, there are no limits. My creativity isn’t bounded. If I want to say, “Good nite, my readers!” who cares? Maybe it will wake some people up. Why can’t I use magic in my writing? Why can’t I make up words or spelling, stretching myself, pushing readers to think outside the box? Overly stuffy and formal writing and expecting strict compliance to a rigid set of rules is paralyzing.  The truth is that plot, character, and setting as well as using appropriate sentence and paragraph length are more important than using a few words correctly. In fact, I have already violated several of the rules of The Elements of Style in this review.   Avoid foreign language. It is a bad habit. Write in English.  What about carpe diem? Seize the day? Readers are smart. Treat them as such.  Avoid fancy words. Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready, and able.  Isn’t that one of the beauties of reading? Ordinarily, our vocabulary is limited to a certain set of words in our everyday usage; however, when you read you get to dust off those fancy words, words that you recognize but you don’t often use when you speak. When I encounter a fancy word, I feel like when I am walking along a beach and find an amazing seashell. The fancy words are beautiful treasures. For example, take the first sentence from His Dark Materials by my favorite author, Philip Pullman: Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen. Darkening is not a word that I normally say out loud, but I really enjoyed it in this sentence. Of course, fancy words should be balanced. If I attempted to use the thesaurus to change every single word into something more sophisticated, the sentence would sound ridiculous and take away from the storytelling.   Do not inject opinion.  Is this guy joking? This is classic, “Do as I say and not as I do.”  No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.  Who proofread this? The entire book is distrustful of the reader and is patronizing. Also, you don’t need a comma between “intelligence” and “or.” What kind of grammar book is this? Time for street justice. Who won: Lisa of Troy or Strunk/EB White? Put your “two cents” in the comments!   Connect With Me!  Blog Twitter BookTube Facebook Insta                    546 reviews9,422 followers     December 26, 2014   There must be some structure to language. We must agree on some aspects of it, and creating rules and definitions around those mutual agreements helps to foster intelligibility throughout the language.Likewise, this agreement to abide by these rules means that we can teach communication. This does not mean only in the case of children, but it certainly simplifies it for them. This also means that writers can continue to learn, to interact, and to write understandably and not wastefully. We take these rules from traditions, but also from common sense. Strunk's rulings on word use (especially amongst words with similar meanings) are based on the root words, and the original meanings. Strunk means to separate these similar words so that instead of synonyms, we have two similar but precise words. This also prevents confusion, as various English dialects may take these words in different ways, but all share the same roots. However, language changes constantly, so regulating it and placing rules on it is difficult. Many feel that it stifles creativity, or that it places hegemonic power in the hands of the elite. One benefit of this regulation is that we can read Shakespeare today with little trouble. Dictionaries came into popularity around the time of Shakespeare, as did the study of philology. We have more trouble reading Chaucer, even though only two-hundred years separate Chaucer and Shakespeare, while twice that length separates Shakespeare from us. The work of Strunk and White is not to close off language, nor to set it absolutely free, but to make a linguistic analysis of its forms, meanings and changes, but one that the layman can appreciate. The work is somewhat dated by today's standards, but this actually provides the perfect example for many of the book's observations on the mutability of language. It likewise supports the assertion that language may change, but not as much as you might think. Strunk and White is just as useful to an author today as it was when it was compiled. It is light-hearted and often humorous, and presents language and communication in a thoughtful way. Any writer should come away from this book with a new respect for language, and with a keener eye for seeing their own writing. While the book sometimes seems severe in its regulations, this is only because misuse is so rampant and so ugly. Similarly, someone might tell you "under no circumstances should you balance on a chair on the edge of the roof of a ten story building". This rule is perfectly reasonable, despite the fact that some well-trained, adventurous individuals are quite capable of this feat. The fact remains that for the majority, violating these simple rules will result in an unsightly mess. A talented and experienced writer can flaunt and even break the rules when it suits him. The greatest writers do, and this book gives examples of how and why they do it. However, rules are how we create meaning. Whether you follow them or break them, you must know them and understand how they work in order to communicate to your reader. You cannot subvert and idea unless you understand it, and you cannot communicate anything to your reader that doesn't have a basis in their experiences and understanding. There is no impressive act of creation that is not conscious and considered, because rebellion cannot happen in a void. It's the rule that proves the exception.     non-fiction reference reviewed               865 reviews1,271 followers     March 2, 2011   In her charming essay, "Insert a Carrot", Anne Fadiman describes a trait shared by everyone in her family - a heightened sensitivity to the flaws in other people's writing. The Fadimans all belong to that tribe whose members cannot read without simultaneously copy-editing. When dining out, they amuse each other by pointing out typos on the menu. It might seem obnoxious, but really they just can't help it. If you're blessed with the copy-editing gene you can't just switch it off. I have the same problem. When I read, typographical and grammatical errors leap off the page, assailing my eyeballs, demanding to be noticed. A distraction that I am incapable of ignoring, they hijack my attention and diminish my respect for the author. I want my own writing to be free of such distractions; it should be forceful and persuasive. I welcome constructive advice that helps me attain that goal. My copy of "Modern American Usage" is grubby and well-thumbed. I think its author, Bryan A. Garner, has accomplished something quite remarkable. He has written a usage guide that gives writers clear, concrete, reasoned advice, without being overly dogmatic or erring on the side of sloppiness. I hate sloppy writing.  I also hate Strunk and White. Its popularity is inexplicable to me. Here are just a few of my objections: 1. Their famous motto, "Omit needless words", is fatuous and has absolutely no practical value. (If I knew how to do this, I'd already be some kind of great communication guru.) Repeating this essentially vapid advice in similarly empty formulations like "Be clear" and "Don't explain too much" is of no practical help to anybody, and suggests that even the authors have difficulty in deciphering their own admonitions. 2. The stylistic tips that are not simply platitudinous are often just silly, hopelessly vague, or reflective of the long outdated prejudices of a couple of old white dudes.  For example -  Do not inject opinion.Prefer the standard to the offbeat.Do not use dialect unless your ear is good. Write with nouns and verbs.Don't construct awkward adverbs.Avoid fancy words.Use figures of speech sparingly.Do not overwrite. Having trouble figuring out whether your ear is "good", your adverb is "awkward", or your writing is "over"? Good luck with that. S &amp; W will be of no help whatsoever. Why not? 3. The examples used to illustrate "bad" style in the book are generally ludicrously bad. The need for correction is so glaringly obvious that the examples have little instructive value. The authors are well able to demolish straw men, but if you want advice on a subtle point, they are unlikely to be of any practical help. 4. The fetishistic obsession with avoiding the passive voice is (a) baffling (b) profoundly irritating when some freaking paperclip starts to lecture you about it (c) so obviously idiotic that the authors themselves ignore it throughout the book.  Other questionable decrees include the ukase that "none" should always take a singular verb, the prohibition on starting a sentence with "however", and the pointless "which/that" discussion. These exemplify one of the book's biggest problems, which - to be fair - is not necessarily the authors' fault. It has achieved the status of a kind of sacred text, with all of the problems that result. People become blind to the internal inconsistencies within the text, it gets quoted with the kind of self-righteous zeal characteristic to "true believers" and to similar ends. Instead of stimulating thoughtful discussion, S &amp; W is wielded as a weapon to end it. Which might not be so terrible if the advice it contains were not so vague, idiosyncratic and frequently inconsistent. Probably the most infuriating aspect of writing our book was my co-author's continual invocation of Strunk and White as the final arbiter. One can only wonder by whose authority these two gentlemen were anointed God. In a cunning marketing gimmick, the latest edition of Strunk and White has been jazzed up by including illustrations by Maira Kalman. Ms Kalman is a delightful artist, whose work elsewhere I greatly admire. But she really should have said no to this particular project. Her illustrations are occasionally pretty, sometimes baffling, but generally pointless. They add no particular insight, though some readers may find them a welcome distraction from the barked eccentricities of the book's two main authors.     words-and-language               Author  1 book809 followers     April 16, 2020   “It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric”, says professor Strunk. The old fart was probably referring to his students at Cornell University. The Elements of Style is indeed a dusty textbook (1918), but still widely in use today. It aims at providing a set of rules and tips on how to write properly, if not elegantly. Stephen King, in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, strongly recommends this book to any aspiring fiction writer.In truth, such rules as, for instance, the pre-eminence of the active over the passive voice, or the superiority of the positive over the negative mode in a sentence (which, at the time, were perhaps not as evident), have become the sesame of communication, advocated at school, in business and even in spelling and grammar software. Some of Strunk’s remarks are amusing, sarcastic even, like this one on the use of the word Nature: “Often vaguely used in such expressions as “a lover of nature;” “poems about nature.” Unless more specific statements follow, the reader cannot tell whether the poems have to do with natural scenery, rural life, the sunset, the untracked wilderness, or the habits of squirrels.” While this hodgepodge of rules is at best a bit arbitrary and, at worst, quite outdated, the core of it all is to prompt students to write boldly, confidently, legibly, with crispness and vigour, and avoid fizzling out with sloppy writing — nothing wrong about that.                   Author  22 books47 followers     October 14, 2007   The gold standard. No more need be said than to quote Mr. Strunk's thoughts under the headline "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. This requires not that the reader make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." And every word of Mr. Strunk's (as updated and expanded by the brilliant and self-effacing E.B. White) indeed does tell. Don't touch your keyboard without reading this book!     writing-craft               Author  1 book8,093 followers     March 15, 2021   I still remember, and will always remember, my 11th grade English class. Before that year, English class had meant little more than vocabulary tests, book reports, and those five-paragraph (hamburger) essays. But this class was different. Our teacher was not interested in getting us to pass a standardized test; instead, she wanted to really teach us how to read and write.To my astonishment, I realized that nobody had ever done that before. I had been taught how to write a five-paragraph essay, but not how to write. I had been taught how to pass tests on books, but not how to read them. Writing formulaic essays and passing multiple-choice tests requires certain skills: brute memorization and learning by rote. But reading and writing require something much different: a sensitivity to the written word. Integral to developing this sensitivity was reading this slim volume.  The Elements of Style is normally billed as a kind of guidebook or instruction manual—these are the rules of grammar; these are the rules of style: follow them and you will produce good writing. And, indeed, this is how the book is formatted. But half of Strunk’s rules of grammar and usage are hopelessly outdated; the other half will probably be outdated in another fifty years. What’s more, how can anyone hope to encapsulate ‘good style’, since highly respected authors have written an enormous variety of styles? No; the value of this book lies neither in its rules of grammar nor of style. It is valuable because Strunk and White cherish language. Consider this quote: “The colon has more effect than the comma, less power to separate than the semicolon, and more formality than the dash.” Now, this may or may not be true; I’m not saying it isn’t. My point is that, regardless, what’s important is Strunk’s attitude—that he cared deeply enough about writing to sit down and describe the feelings evoked by punctuation. To my high school self, this was beyond belief. Strunk felt that writing was about communication—getting your point across fully without wasting the reader’s time. Say what you will about him, he was not a hypocrite; this little book can be read in one sitting. In fact, so fully does this book live up to its author’s ideals, that the reader gets a full dose of his personality. When reading Strunk's taut bullet points—“Put statements into positive form!” “Omit needless words!”—you can almost hear him yelling them in a crowded classroom—his voice harsh and nasal, his skin pale, his face cleanly shaven, wearing a tweed jacket and tapping the lectern with an open palm.  “Omit needless words!” he says again, this time with a slight grin. And with that grin, you both realize the obvious: that he’s secretly thankful for all the writers who don’t abide by his principles; otherwise, he would have nothing to be grumpy about. The point is not that you write this way or that; the point is that you care about the way you choose.     help-me-help-myself highly-recommended-favorites prose-style               6 reviews4 followers     June 20, 2019   This is a wonderful book for beginning writers to use as a guide. It cleary spells out the rules of English grammar, and provides examples to explain each guideline. I highly recommend this little gem! I bought this book at special price from here: https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style...                   2,855 reviews1,888 followers     December 24, 2016   Rating: 5* of fiveThe essential guide to HOW to write! How much better to start with a guide to achieving an effect you're looking for.                   Author  17 books333 followers     April 21, 2013   It is very good for what it does, which is advise on how to write clearly and concisely. But generations of writers have completely misunderstood its purpose and used it as a Bible of Good Writing. It's not. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum has famously gone on something of a crusade against The Elements of Style, and while he makes good points, it may be a little unfair to blame S&amp;W for the fact that writers don't realize the original authors were addressing an audience of barely-literate college students. If you are a fiction writer, S&amp;W's advice should be taken with a very large grain of salt — if you try to write novels using The Elements of Style as your guide, you will probably write very cleanly and correctly but very badly.    grammar non-fiction owned               Author  2 books306 followers     March 12, 2020   Many other books on writing are not as directly helpful as this one. I have made every mistake a human being can make while writing. I'm making mistakes right now. Improvement is a lifelong process. This readable and referenceable book is one to keep in the desk drawer, to peruse before and after writing.Aside from the argument that the English language is sliding toward less standardization, many editors, agents, publishers and readers demand or expect PhD-level grammar (whatever that equates to). But it really should not take years of reading and diagramming sentences to put words together in a satisfactory fashion. If you have tried other how-to-write books, I'd set them aside until you've finished this one. This may contain all you need to know in a much smaller bundle. As a rule, I am not a fan of criticism. I could pick apart most pieces of writing. You could pick apart most of what I write. It's human nature to seek out flaws. In order to write competitively, writers must arm themselves against critics. But even more than that, communication benefits from clarity and articulation. I feel that a close study of this book will elevate a writer's awareness of certain flaws. These flaws pass most of us by without notice. But they can also undermine an otherwise excellent piece of writing.  Wouldn't we all like to write at a level where grammar is no longer part of the equation, where each sentence unfurls from the pen with the pithy lightning strike of Oscar Wilde's polished prose, on the first draft of course, where we can excavate the furthest reaches of our imagination and mind without regard to "should the comma go here, or here?" But I am not sure if such a state of nirvana exists. Revision never ends. In summary, I recommend picking up this book. I trust it much more than those bloggers (paid by the word) posting "Helpful Tips."     2020 5-star nonfiction               Author  12 books271 followers     May 30, 2019   This small book is a mountain of good writing advice!                   17 reviews16 followers     July 3, 2022     To quote Stephen King in the foreword of his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: "I figured the shorter the book, the less the nonsense*. One notable exception to the nonsense* rule is The Element of Styles, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. There is little or no detectable nonsense* in that book."  I agree with that statement!  This book is not perfect so of course it's got some errors. However, there are reasons this is considered one of the most important books on writing. The fact that it stands the test of time since its first publication in 1918 also goes to show how helpful it's been to a lot of people.  I based my review on my own experiences and observations. From what I can see, the main lesson for most people I know who have read this book is 'omit needless words' which is good and might be music to an editor's ears but it's more than that to me! It shows how clear thinking will produce clear writing which is a great deal in communicating a message to others.  Every time I revisit it, I'm reminded of not only how much I can learn from my past mistakes but also how much more I need to know in order to improve myself. It's a very humbling learning experience! The playful and vibrant illustrations by Maira Kalman in this edition also make learning from this book more enjoyable and fun.  Knowing the elements of our writing style will help us express our voices better. Like someone dear to me used to say: To live is to serve. In the end, if the expression of our voices is clear, so much so that it can help others find their voices as well? Then that's all that matters!  * = edited words Picture credit: unsplash.com     favourites language priority-list                 Author  0 books249 followers     November 3, 2016   Write to-day, to-night, to-morrow (but not together) with hyphen.Write any one, every one, some one, some time (except the sense of formerly) as two words. Thanking you in advance. This sounds as if the writer meant, "It will not be worth my while to write to you again." Simply write, "Thanking you," and if the favor which you have requested is granted, write a letter of acknowledgment. #Life-Writing-Lessons!       100-pages               771 reviews12.1k followers     March 11, 2015   I find this book fascinating, especially when comparing it to modern style guides. While it won't become my go to when working with students, I consider it a valuable resource.     first-reads               Author  4 books154 followers     July 10, 2017   As a couple of reviewers have mentioned, Elements of Style has become somewhat out of style. There are plenty of people who stand by it as a trusted source for all things grammar, but I imagine even diehard supporters will grudgingly admit that the standards it established have led to some truly convoluted sentences.Even so, I still recommend it as a handy pocketbook for anybody who's interested in the craft of writing. When I originally read it a number of years ago, I was a little strict in following the rules it outlined. It had a negative impact on my writing. But as I outgrew some of the habits it taught me, I began to think of it more as a leap off point for amateur wordsmiths, a sturdy foundation for beginners to build their own style on. Yes, there are probably more up to date guides on grammar and writing, but I haven't read those, so my rating for this book exists in a vacuum of sorts: It's a good manual if you take it as the beginning of wisdom, not the end. Most importantly, the material is simple and engaging. The examples and logic are straightforward. And at the very least it will get you playing with the English language.                    161 reviews655 followers     August 13, 2020   This is an essential book on the basic principles of a good writing style. A must-read for anyone who aspires to be a serious writer. (Stephan King)                  68 reviews1 follower     January 3, 2009   I never thought I would say this about a book, but every writer needs to read this book. Hell, if you plan on writing anything you should read this book. The title is very misleading. Anyone who came across it for the first time might think it was a book about "style" as an artform. For those who are worried about the pedantry of writing, this book is mostly about grammar and what can be more effective in using the English language. This needs to be in the curriculumn for high schools, especially now when grammar is being forgotten so that people can e-mail and sound stupid on myspace. I only had two bones to pick with this book: First, I thought a comment E.B. White made in terms of using only "he" instead of "she" as a universal antecedent for sentences that may begin, "One must watch his/her step," is a bit off for somebody who studies language. On one hand we have someone in love with language who agrees with Strunk that student body should be replaced with studentry, and on the other hand White is giving in to gender roles within language. A bit silly, and as many readers might have picked recognized, writing books have "she" in a lot of them. Second, White made a comment about not using a foreign language in a work which, though I agree can be confusing, can still be pulled off. The way it came across was distasteful. But those are perhaps just comments on what I might feel about White as a person and not as a writer or teacher. Get this book!     favorites               360 reviews359 followers     April 10, 2021   Who knew a book about grammar could be so entertaining &amp; useful? And Frank McCourt is the perfect choice to perform the audiobook!    audio-books non-fiction               1,966 reviews1,385 followers     November 22, 2016   I find it very impressive that this was written almost one hundred years ago and still remains so relevant and revered today.The book does exactly what the title suggests – covers stylistic elements of the English language. Each rule covered has multiple examples attached to it for proficient understanding and it managed to be both highly informative, whilst offering me nothing new. This is certainly of great practical help in academic writing, but I found it rather lacking for my current desires.  I listened to this in audiobook form and I don't think it was really suited towards that format. The information was relayed in a dry and uninspiring style that felt a little repetitive and I could feel my attention dwindling as I attempted to process the over-abundance of information. The grammatical advice was not new to me, which allowed my attention to drift further, and I think I would have more appreciation for this if I had discovered it sooner.  This covers the basic grammatical and stylistic principles of good academic writing and I feel it is a good starter manual for any budding writer. Unfortunately, I was expecting something different going into this and it wasn't exactly what I was currently looking for.     adult-books-read authorial-advice non-fiction-nuances               32 reviews19 followers     July 3, 2021    All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation — it is the Self escaping into the open. No writer long remains incognito. To review, the book is an amazingly curated edition that has scored well in the attempt of presenting vital things in a concise and clear manner.  And, here are some of my prime takeaways from the book. •	Unnecessary emphasis of a sentence is never the demand.•	The word but when trailed after doubt or help turns needless.•	Data is and always were data.•	Avoid however at the start of a sentence, they tend to fit better when placed in between.•	The habit of adding the suffix -ize into a noun in order to create a verb is responsible for making one ignorant regarding the already present words.•	“One of the” is a feeble writing formula. Cut it and find a precise orientation.•	Facts require no advance billing.•	Do not be tempted by a fancy word when there is already a handy word.•	The best spelling is the one that is regarded as orthodox today.•	Writing style matters as it is what overpowers emotions into the words.•	Revise &amp; Rewrite, but do not overwrite.  I am absolutely glad to have read this book.                   64 reviews17 followers     December 31, 2016   It's a little prescriptive, but this book's advice is solid. The fourth chapter was actually fun to read because parts of it came across as a long, pompous rant."To say, "Hopefully I'll leave on the noon plane" is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you'll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you'll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven't said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense." Hopefully I don't run into Strunk or White on the street; they would really hate how I usually talk and write. There is some great advice about writing forcefully and concisely in this book, and at a hundred pages it's well worth the time.     found-at-bookstores reference               Author  39 books363 followers     April 16, 2015   What a great book - a classic. I loved the funny examples (of yore), sentences most of us would not write any longer. Then again, because we would not write them anymore we pay attention, we are tempted to analyze them. Is the book still relevant? You bet!“… show the weakness of the word NOT. Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; he wishes to be told what is. Hence, as a rule, it is better to express even a negative in positive form. Not honest ................................dishonestNot important .............................triflingDid not remember...........................forgotDid not pay attention to...................ignoredDid not have much confidence in............distrusted…” And isn’t it, that we read the words listed on the left side, every day? Whoops, make that, "the book's importance and relevance is proven in the fact that that most of us get to read and also write the words listed on the left side, too frequently.  Highly recommended.  Gisela Hausmann, author &amp; blogger     useful-nonfction               199 reviews46 followers     January 2, 2019   I have always wanted to be fluent in English ever since I took to this language. I was inspired by my cousin who was ‘English-era’ and whom I found smart at answering any question I would pose to her. I was even astounded to find out that she always memorized English words with her mini dictionary to be more expressive of her thoughts and feelings. I thought to myself that in doing so could have been the key to becoming proficient in English. Fascinated, I did the same manner; she allowed me to borrow her dictionary, and I committed all the words to memory. When I finished that dictionary, I had proven my hypothesis. Thereafter, not satisfied with the words new to me, I had tried more than two dictionaries until I got nauseated by the words I was trying to take in.But I was in for a rude awakening when I asked myself how I had to speak as impeccably as grammar Nazis do, the phrase I was not yet aware of . Also, at that time, I was envious of a political icon in the Philippines who was admired for her intelligence and oratorical speeches. For sure, whenever I spoke English with great aplomb because of my crystallized knowledge of vocabulary, I must not have been aware of the fact that those people whom I addressed would cringe at my ” Carabao English”. Thanks to my unconscious thirst for learning; I had persevered in reading more English text books,and English became my favorite subject throughout my school life . To advance my English skills, I decided to teach Koreans since teaching them seemed like was all the fashion then. Eventually, I got a wrong perception . So, working as an ESL teacher for nine years means I have learned a lot of lessons on English grammar and structures, particularly on effective writing. As a result, I have become confident about my English. My friends would even tag me as a grammar policeman, the title I learned to accept. However, I smashed that delusion because I realized one time that there are people we may not know who suffer from learning disabilities. I believe that disdaining someone’s shortcomings in perfect English is an example of intellectual hubris. When I first read The Elements of Style ( second edition) during my teaching career in an international language school, I realized that there were a lot of things I still had not known. Also, it dawned on me that not all the information I had learned was correct. Consequently, I had this ” grammatical crisis”, the same as the law term ” constitutional crisis” when a government agency is unable to function effectively because of the ambiguous and illogical application of the law. However, I was not too scholarly to acknowledge the points of the book, for I preferred to believe the authority of the authors whose books I had relied on for so many years. It was as though I had disposed of the book down the gutter and chose to remain incorrigible. intransigent, and denial. It was just as well that I read its pdf. When I got this book for its third edition, I already felt like looking to a panel of experts on the English language or a faculty of teachers who have been dedicated to teaching English to non-native speakers for some enlightenment . There were some grammar parts I was discombobulated about. ( William Strunk would be shuddering at my using this adjective.) Eventually, I realized that the authors, two versus the authors I look up to, have the method to their madness. The book is divided into five parts which steered clear of my blissful ignorance: Elementary Usage of Rules, Elementary Principles of Composition, A Few Matters of Form , Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, and An Approach to Style. The first part Elementary Usage of Rules shattered my world again when I revisited some wrong grammatical information I disregarded before: # 1. I must not use an apostrophe (‘) if the proper noun ends with s. Ever since I opened the first English textbook I read (that was a poignant memory), I learned that I can use an apostrophe (‘) even if the proper noun ends with s. That book is even supported by standardized English test books studied by non-native speakers. #2. No comma should separate a noun from a restrictive form of identification. I am now too old to remember this basic fact. Punctuation marks like comma and dash used for appositive phrases should be to blame for my confusion. #3 When the connective is and , the comma should be omitted if the relation between the two statements is close or immediate. Finally, I am clear about this rule. I had been bothered if I’d rather separate two independent clauses using FANBOYS than combining then with the same subject of the sentences. #4 .The book points out that it is a blunder when we use a singular verb form in a relative clause following” one of …’ Another grammar point that I have been confused about until now. Basically, most grammar books I have read argue that it is correct to use both singular and plural verb forms. However, they prefer using the singular verb form in a sense that one of…refers to a singular noun excluding itself from the group. My favorite part of the book is Elementary Principles of Composition. Although I have learned most of the tips on effective writing several times,I am exhilarated by their emphatic significance. Sometimes, I don’t give a hoot when some professional writers are constantly reminding me of them, but now it is about time I took their advice. Besides, there are some bad writing habits I should really break: #1.Brevity and concise. My writing style is kind of digression most of the time. I believe so. #2. Statements should be put in positive form. I am in the habit of writing statements with doubt not necessarily because I want to assert my opinions . I always believe that I should not insist something invalid and unreliable since there are many beholders in the universe. I’d rather leave my audience up in the air and find the answers themselves. #3. Use definite , specific, concrete language. I agree with the authors of the book that the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. Sometimes, my general statements obscure my main points. Kinda words salad. # 4 .Omit needless words. Here I am again. I love injecting non-essential clauses. #5. An article or a preposition applying to all the members of a series must either be used only before the first term of a series must either be used only before the first term or else be repeated before each term. Gee, I was right when a professor corrected my sentence before because I followed this rule. #6 . In summaries, keep to one tense This is the rule I want to share with my friends who have been puzzled by what tense they should use in summarizing dramas, poems, novels, or stories. The book suggests that we use the present tense or the past tense. If we want to make the story or drama sound natural, we can stick to the past tense form. I also enjoyed A Few Matters of Form. I just learned from this part that most dates and numbers are best spelled out in dialogues. Also, since I am into blogging, I should omit initial A or The from titles when I place the possessive form before them. Awesome! Words and Expressions Commonly Misused discusses the correct words and expressions I have reviewed several times, and I should not complicate anymore. For example, we can simply use whether instead of as to whether or yet not as yet. The book also suggests the words acceptable to writing which in effect failed to provide justifiable reasons such as at this at this moment not currently; because of not due to ; enthusiastic not enthuse , in regards to not as regards, insightful not perceptive . In addition, the book expresses distaste for our acute habit of using the words and phrases we have thought to be part of normal communication such as one of the most , relate to , respectively , the foreseeable future, utilize , very, finalize , hopefully , importantly and so on. Admittedly, I have used most of them in my blog posts many times. (laughs) For more lists of words and phrases we must avoid, click here . An Approach to Style gives a list of reminders on effective writing. I enjoyed this part because I learned that we can have our own styles of writing, but should consider the elements we should use to make our masterpiece acceptable and vigorous. The Guardian and Time magazine considered The Elements of Style one of the most influential non-fiction of all time. It is sort of like a bible for all English teachers and writers. Thus, the major impacts it had on me , aside from the correct English grammar and structures, are the growing realization that English is not the basis of intelligence at all , but we should never stop learning if we want to be better at this language . Besides, this acts as another catalysts for my insatiable desire for becoming a good writer in the foreseeable future- the time expression repulsed William Strunk Jr. and E.B White. (laughs)                   195 reviews36 followers     July 15, 2020   Had I read this a year ago, happily under the spell of grammar nazism, I might have filled this little review with the kind of gleaming praise and happy diligence of the awakened; however, in the past year I was compelled to take up a few contemporary grammar and style guides and subsequently have developed a sore throat around these pills. I spit them out.My grammar is not sparkling, nor even prone to an occasional gloss shimmer; nonetheless, a book of this sort does little to help the sheen. Its voice is commanding and the pressing of its commands outright to the reader leaves little space for compromise. The authority it has gained thereby, and particularly over young writers and students, is somewhat unnerving in its potential. It is troubling, in particular and general, that the book's tidiness comes at the cost of elaboration. A command is short and to the point, but it is not explicative. There are a few exceptions in which the categoricity of these commands is spelled out for the reader, but in most cases we are left alone with the word. So in these circumstances there is no knowing those rules that are worth following from those that are not.     grammar
The Elements of Style
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33514.The_Elements_of_Style
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13540208-stylish-academic-writing
Stylish Academic Writing
2012-04-01
Author
<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8841929-michael-meeuwis"></a></section><section><p>315 reviews1 follower</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/861155592">May 10, 2015</a></section><div><p>Under the guise of writing advice, this book recommends things that I have been taught to be bad intellectual practice. One of these is flat misrepresentation. The summary of Jonathan Culler's defense of Judith Butler's prose on pg. 156, for example, completely misrepresents what Culler is saying: he doesn't say that Butler presents a "merry-go-round," prosodically, but rather tries to help the reader with abstruse concepts by repeating them several times. There are a number of other serious problems here. Many of the writers Sword cites are public intellectuals on the Richard Dawkins or Stephen Greenblatt level; simply put, these are writers who are trying to engage a broader public, and are as a result writing in their recent work in a less rigorous style. Which is exactly the point, maybe, about scholars at that point in their careers--although Greenblatt in particular is a much more nuanced and (yes) jargon-creating writing than Sword gives him credit for being. This is to his credit, not to his detriment. <p>Saying that academic writing is bad isn't even shooting fish in a barrel--or if it is, it's doing so with orbital missile systems. Part of the reason for this is that 90% of all writing is bad; if anything, academics are more reflective about this than other writers. With that nevertheless as given, Sword recommends many things--jokes, overly-personal anecdotes, elaborate figurative language--that reviewers have told me to specifically remove from my journal articles. By citing figures at the peak of their careers, she is citing people whose work is often edited in different ways. </p><p>With that said, there are good points. Derrida and Foucault tend to be clearer and cannier than those who cite them excessively; this might be why they were the two most-cited academics of their generation. Why we need someone else saying this is beyond me.</p><p>The most useful points of this book, its occasional listing of concrete suggestions for improving writing, would most usefully have been printed on a two-sided laminated sheet of paper, which might be pinned up by one's computer. There is a lot of verbiage, star-fucking, and a kind of curdled distaste for people trying to do new things--which often relates in awkward prose, often the site of the unformed but fascinated idea--getting in the way of this laminated sheet. This twaddle is coupled with a lack of genuinely new ideas. Telling someone to ask what the "main point" of their article is is something I learned around the third grade; although it is nice to be reminded to do this from time to time, it is not pleasant to do so in prose this high-handed and, frequently, cliched ("clarity and complexity are bedfellows, not rivals," "An effective first paragraph...must...make the reader want to keep reading," "captures our imagination," etc. etc. ad infinitum.)</p><p>The hell of it is: if you skim this like a Florida airboat, you will probably become aware of three or four categories of writing improvement that might help you. Write these down, pin 'em to your desk, and forget how Stephen Greenblatt wrote his articles. You have your own ideas to struggle with, and your own voice to find. You're not going to find that in this Whitman's Sampler of cack-handedly obvious cliches.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/113387426-craig"></a></section><section><p>59 reviews18 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4773918927">June 17, 2022</a></section><div><p>On the one hand, a lot of this is nothing new. The book encourages writers to peek over the disciplinary fences and draw from what scholars are doing in other fields. It tells its readers that their academic work can be both complex <i>and</i> also clear and concrete. It grants permission to use the personal pronoun. It celebrates the short, forceful phrase as an alternative to the long, turgid, labyrinthine sentence. It suggests titling things in eye-catching ways and working hooks into openings. It promotes the frequent use of examples. It proposes the sparing and judicious use of jargon. It encourages a lightly experimental approach to structure and form. Its six “ideals,” its “Cs”—<i>communication</i>, <i>craft</i>, <i>creativity</i>, <i>concreteness</i>, <i>choice</i>, and <i>courage</i>—are straightforward.<p>On the other hand, one thing that sets the book apart is the extent to which its research foundation, the set of hand-selected, discipline-exemplary journals from which Sword draws both qualitive and indeed quantitative evidence for her writing analyses, is thorough, detailed, and made helpfully explicit in an appendix. There’s a firm grounding in specifics and illustrative examples throughout (Sword often takes her own advice, to her credit), though these can also lead to significant problems with a kind of audience confusion. One of the strongest chapters in the book, the one on abstracts of various kinds (“The Big Picture”), does acknowledge the importance of fitness for purpose and venue, but the rest of the book’s advice seems at times to work with an unhelpfully lazy definition of “academic writing” and its individual and institutional audiences. Does a famous, popular public intellectual like Richard Dawkins have the same audience as a scholar publishing in a narrowcast specialist academic journal? How transferrable are the insights from the former to the latter context really? Is “do what works for the widely published, internationally feted, and award-winning” <i>actually</i> good, practicable advice for anonymous early-career scholars buying writing guides on their nearly-maxed-out credit cards?</p><p>Speaking of audience, it seems to me that if you follow Sword’s advice about including personal narratives, anecdotes, poeticisms and other creative flourishes in your scholarly work, a lot of the time what you’ll produce will at best be simply cut and at worst be grounds for a rejected submission. I can’t help thinking that like so much writing advice, this all seems written mainly for the one audience that doesn’t ultimately need it: in this case, academics who are already successful enough and have advanced far enough that their bold moves might be published with a degree of editorial lightness and generosity that would be unreasonable for a rookie to expect.</p><p>And some of the advice just seems mad to try to follow. <i>Should</i> we lay bare the “methodological prejudices [that] lurk just below the surface of any academic text” (135) by, for example, “disrupt[ing] normative elements such as citation styles” so that we can “send those unspoken assumptions scurrying out into the light” as we write and submit articles with our fingers crossed for publication and career advancement? How big will this kind of thing <i>really</i> go over with the editors over at the <i>Journal of Finicky Traditionalist Studies</i> brandishing their copies of the house-style guide? Sword waves away concerns about institutional gatekeepers, but they’re real, and we seem to have to take them ever more seriously the more unforgivingly, relentlessly competitive the professional bloodbath of academe gets.</p><p>I don’t know that this will leave you as inspired as some of the other reviews here suggest, or that feelings of inspiration will long survive some of the responses you’ll get when you start doing what Sword suggests. But the book urges you to consider that there are other ways of writing for a scholarly audience than the ones you tend to see in action, that it’s worth being on the lookout for creative opportunities and having the courage to take them, and that academic prose should be a lot more pleasurable than it usually is to write and to read. Given what most academic writing is like, these things <i>are</i> inspiring.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/11931807-chris"></a></section><section><p>212 reviews44 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/514144075">March 2, 2016</a></section><div><p>As a longtime part-time graduate student and employee of a university research center (often in an editing or writing capacity), I found that this book 1) confirmed and affirmed my (negative) perceptions of much scholarly writing, and 2) provided lots of evidence from many fields of how it has been and can be done better. (Really!) Sword raided journals from a wide spectrum of disciplines and found even more problems than I've seen, and but also many examples of concrete, specific, engaging scholarly writing. She uses those to illustrate her many tips for better scholarly writing. To be a scholar is to care deeply about one small corner of the world, and all of us want to inspire others to care about it, too. It's impossible to read this book and not get at least a dozen ideas for how to do that better. <p>Other reviewers have noted that they plan to share it with their grad students--I plan to tell my graduate adviser about it. :)</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/11931807?shelf=higher-ed">higher-ed</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4859940-tara-brabazon"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>22 books318 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3167387143">January 30, 2020</a></section><div><p>What a truly remarkable book. Further, this is is an incredibly courageous book. Any academic - every academic - will think differently about scholarly writing at the conclusion of this book.<p>Importantly, assumptions are not allowed to stand. Analyses of refereed journal articles in a great diversity of disciplines shows that - wait for it - scientists use "I" or "we" more frequently than humanities cholars in their research. </p><p>For PhD students in particular, this is an empowering book. This book offers a way to be different and to write differently. Outstanding. </p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3361474-jennifer"></a></section><section><p>1,619 reviews52 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1113555568">November 23, 2014</a></section><div><p>E. F. Schumacher once wrote that any intelligent fool could make things bigger and more complex, but that it took a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. Helen Sword's <i>Stylish Academic Writing</i> displays just the genius necessary to inspire academics to get up their courage to free their writing of the jargon-heavy passivity choking the life out of it (and their readers).<p>Unlike other guides, Sword brings massive research to bear on the 'problem' of academic writing: the first part of her work describes how she analyzed one thousand academic articles across ten different disciplines, as well as books and articles by one hundred academic writers recommended by their peers for the quality of their writing, and one hundred recently published style guides for academic writers in order to draw her conclusions. When was the last time you read a writing guide that devoted three full chapters to methodology?</p><p>From there, Sword goes on to explore eleven techniques displayed by stylish writers across the disciplines she studied, and each chapter contains both specific examples, good and bad, and simple directives for practices readers can use to improve their own writing. It's all so elegant that Strunk and White (who do get name-dropped several times throughout) would weep with joy.</p><p>Sword acknowledges that academic writing concerns itself with difficult, sometimes abstruse topics, and that sometimes jargon and nominalizations are appropriate to the task at hand. But smart, she argues, doesn't have to mean stultifying. Here's hoping publishing academics find her as persuasive as I did. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3361474?shelf=2014-reads">2014-reads</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/585479054">May 11, 2013</a></section><div><p>This was only okay. The best parts are the exercises at the end of each chapter, really. The text itself is unfocused. The author can't seem to use an example to demonstrate fewer than three different points, two of them inevitably off-topic for the chapter. She tries to do too much with each one, and the result is that they seem carelessly selected. She also fails to transition between topics; most of the text reads like a list of descriptions of stylistic features and is often long-winded, using lots of unnecessary metaphor and colourful language that doesn't add to the meaning or pleasure of reading. She also makes the ridiculous choice to devote an entire chapter to discussing snappy titles and another to snappy section headings. Use Stylish Academic Writing to point you in the direction of some great writers from different fields of study, but otherwise it's a pass.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/10746337-lectus"></a></section><section><p>1,029 reviews30 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/569655600">December 20, 2013</a></section><div><p>Unfortunately, the book is exactly what Sword criticizes scholarly writing is about but shouldn't be: "stodgy, jargon-laden, abstract prose that ignores or defies most of the stylistic principles outlined" (p. 3). Her own book is "a compulsive proclivity for discursive obscurantism and circumambulatory diction" (p. 3). <p>In other words, the books is confusing; I was just lost, and didn't get anything from it. Sword did superb research of other people's writing. Maybe too much research. She got lost in the same thing she was trying to teach us to avoid. </p><p>In fact, I hated doing this, but I returned the book and asked for a refund.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4560662-todd-miles"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>3 books128 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4327293838">December 6, 2021</a></section><div><p>A surprisingly (given the subject) helpful and engaging book. She practices what she preaches. This is a keeper for my Research Methods class.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4560662?shelf=academic-research-methods">academic-research-methods</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/687901569">October 22, 2013</a></section><div><p>Pretty good. Sword writes clearly -- if she didn't, she'd be like a dentist with bad teeth -- and challenges the reader to write whatever they're writing with readability as the ultimate goal. Depending on the field you work in, you might be more or less able to try her many suggestions for writing more stylish academic prose.<p>I feel she under-emphasizes one important tool for creating better writing: rewriting. A piece should go through revisons, and perhaps many revisions, before being considered fit for public consumption. Sword doesn't give the reader a good sense of just how much blood, sweat, and tears should go into an article about hematology, excerise physiology, or romantic poetry.</p><p>Overall, though, if you're fed up reading awfully-written articles and don't want to be producing such articles, "Stylish Academic Writing" will give you some good ideas.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/18423795-beth-sullivan"></a></section><section><p>68 reviews</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5086853055">November 5, 2022</a></section><div><p>It was a well-researched book. I’ll give it that. <p>And I did agree with her apt descriptions of academic writing. As an academic editor, I found myself nodding and agreeing with her descriptions. </p><p>However, the book was a bit of a slog for me. And as her book is about writing engagingly, it’s ironic to me that it did not keep me engaged. </p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5753401-u-recife"></a></section><section><p>122 reviews12 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2403223118">June 18, 2018</a></section><div><p>The title gives you little doubt on what this book is about. If you picked it up, you already know what you are looking for and what you might expect from reading it. However, this is not exactly a manual on how to do it. It’s more of a survey of what others have done (or are doing) as a way to entice you to break from the oftentimes dogmatic pressure to keep in line with the untold stylistic rules of academic production that seem to govern your discipline. <p>Helen Sword does a great job in covering the many aspects of academic text production with insightful comments and very enlightening examples. Every bit of text quoted here serves exactly the function it purports to do, i.e., to back up what is being proposed, or criticized, with what is being practiced by the many academic authors in the different fields surveyed in this study of hers.</p><p>It’s also important to point out that Helen Sword doesn’t just limit this work to a theoretical critique of the many academic stylistic writing practices, good or bad, but also offers good advice on how to achieve better results with one’s own academic written production. On the second part of this book, aptly titled <i>The Elements of Stylishness</i>, Sword finishes all the chapters with an interesting practical section of <i>Things to Try</i>. Here you’ll find all sorts of good ideas on what you can do try out and achieve the same good stylistic results analyzed on the chapter that you have just read. This is immensely useful if you really need to break from all the old habits that prevent you to get the best results with your academic writing.</p><p>From all that has been said above, and given that this is a very targeted book (its readers have a clear idea of what to expect), to recommend it is a futile exercise: If you <i>need</i> it, you know you <i>should</i> read it. Your skills as a more versatile, enticing, and clear academic writer will definitely improve. </p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/769356-andrew"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>15 books37 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/866119152">February 26, 2014</a></section><div><p>Helen Sword rips the veil off one of the worst kept secrets in all of academia: Most academic writing is just plain awful. Jargon-filled, abstract, impersonal, sleep-inducing.<p>What makes Sword's Stylish Academic Writing different is that she has data to back up her claims. She studied five hundred recent articles from academic journals evenly spread over ten different disciplines. For example, she actually counted first-person pronouns (historians being culpable for using the fewest) and abstract nouns (e.g., nominalization--those in higher ed being most guilty of this infraction).</p><p>The good news is--the news is not all bad! Science writers actually used the pronouns "I" and "we" quite a bit. Historians rarely used abstract nouns.</p><p>There was hope on another front. Sword not only studied journal articles but also the advice found in the guidelines for writers issued by the journals. They all tended to advocate:</p><p> The three C's--clarity, coherence, conciseness<br /> Including some short and some long sentences<br /> Plain English<br /> Precision<br /> Active verbs<br /> Telling a story</p><p>There was, however, less consensus on:</p><p> Personal pronouns<br /> Careful use of jargon<br /> Personal voice<br /> Creative expression<br /> Non-standard structure<br /> Engaging titles</p><p>In another twist, she analyzes the writing itself in the guidelines for writers the journals created. Again, on the one hand we get a mix of creative use of metaphor, humor, word play and other engaging techniques, while on the other hand we find styles of writing that are, yes, academic and stodgy.</p><p>Conclusion: yes, convention remains a powerful force that shapes most academic writing. But within every discipline there is latitude for and actual published examples of good, interesting, stylish writing.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/72225145-carmen"></a></section><section><p>22 reviews</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3987886774">July 25, 2021</a></section><div><p>The negative reviews are an absolute mystery to me. This book offers:<p>1) enlightened and detailed analyses of excellent and bad writing throughout various disciplines<br />2) concrete and original advice and prompts for your own writing<br />3) all of which is based on a study of the writing style in academic journals that the writer herself conducted *plus* on an analysis of the advice given in a number of writing guides.</p><p>At the same time it's extremely well written, creatively structured, and in itself an example of the same good writing habits that the author pleads for. I have to add, it took me much longer to finish it than I had expected, because it's so dense in input. </p><p>If you're thinking about getting a guide for academic writing: get this book instead.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/72225145?shelf=on-writing">on-writing</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7768264-garrett"></a></section><section><p>6 reviews2 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/361847772">August 1, 2017</a></section><div><p>I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. As a graduate student in biology, I'm constantly struggling to find my voice in an objectively driven writing world. Sward does a great job at highlighting the how stylish academic writers can still be engaging and educational at the same time. It was actually difficult to get through the book because ideas for my own research writing kept bubbling up. The tips and tricks at the end of each chapter are often simple exercises to help expand your own writing style.<p>I recommend this book to any academic writer —especially those in the hard sciences— looking to add voice, substance, or inspiration to a typically dry writing style.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7768264?shelf=guide-books-technical">guide-books-technical</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/82212787-wagner-floriani"></a></section><section><p>110 reviews15 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3066432636">January 14, 2020</a></section><div><p>Excellent guidance. Beautifully expressed. Will revisit often!</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/15895934-jules"></a></section><section><p>88 reviews62 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3097027709">December 24, 2019</a></section><div><p>The Sword is mightier than the pen. <p>Helen Sword demystifies the rules around academic writing and shares thoughts on how those assumptions have come to be. Sword has a beautiful way of coaching the reader to understand the intention of their writings. The book begins with some digestible research across multiple disciplines. She share some clear metrics to help the academic writer see the trends in their silo. I was moved by her arguments for accessible writing as a way of bringing the academy together. </p><p>The chapters flow from academic culture to how writing resources are informed. Sword does an excellent job showcasing the conventions and offers some opportunities to innovate. I was impressed by the spotlights that demonstrate how to assembly of stylish academic writing. A fantastic book with lots of great resources. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/15895934?shelf=leadership">leadership</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/26953271-yassir-morsi"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>4 books56 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4907888203">August 10, 2022</a></section><div><p><a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/250371.Helen_Sword">Helen Sword</a> claims Stylish Academic Writing is “at best an oxymoron and at worst a risky business”. So why should academics accessorise their "research with gratuitous stylistic flourishes?" In <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/23578844.Stylish_Academic_Writing">Stylish Academic Writing</a>, Sword defends the claim “that elegant ideas deserve elegant expression”. And “intellectual creativity thrives best in an atmosphere of experimentation rather than conformity”. <p>I enjoyed the book, as an academic who long resisted both the “Academese” and “Westernese” that crippled my discipline (politics). These two terms capture how too often, social scientists are expected to use approved Western secular jargon as advertising both their brand and entry into an intellectual club. </p><p>This book showcases the work of academic writers from across disciplines who stretch and break disciplinary moulds. Highly recommended for any academic who struggles with writing in an inauthentic voice. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/26953271?shelf=writing-methodology">writing-methodology</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/15600899-alex-kissling"></a></section><section><p>9 reviews1 follower</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2919251851">December 5, 2019</a></section><div><p>3.5- some good examples but a lot about rejecting conventional structure that I didn’t necessarily agree with. However, I really liked her examples of how to explain abstract ideas in more concrete ways. </p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/15600899?shelf=writing">writing</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/27936708-shane-williamson"></a></section><section><p>141 reviews32 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5123005580">December 12, 2022</a></section><div><p>2022 reads: 25<p>Rating: 3.5 stars</p><p>[Read for the Graduate Research Seminar at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary]</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/27936708?shelf=writing-research">writing-research</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2520034-marleen"></a></section><section><p>34 reviews</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2876483932">July 22, 2019</a></section><div><p>Wonderfully written with lots of examples and suggestions. Loved the "things to try" at the end of the chapters.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/10130127-joe"></a></section><section><p>524 reviews</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/372585260">July 20, 2012</a></section><div><p>An intriguing blend of research, advice, and cheerleading. Sword is interested in the range of stylistic choices open to academic writers—and why they so seldom take advantage of them. She conducts four kinds of research: (1) a survey of what colleagues see as stylish writing in their fields, (2) an analysis of about 100 books mentioned by them as stylish, (3) an analysis of 1000 typical articles across disciplines, and (4) an analysis of the advice given by authors of style manuals. Oddly, though, this ambitious research program only gets about 1/3 of the pages in her book; the rest is devoted to fairly familiar advice about writing concrete, jargon-free prose. Too bad. But still, a much more interesting book on style than usual. I read it in a single sitting.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/10130127?shelf=writing">writing</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7238027-olivier"></a></section><section><p>69 reviews9 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/424280492">September 29, 2012</a></section><div><p>This is not really an academic style manual. Rather than presenting a list of "tips" and recommendations, it presents examples of "good" writing by writers from all areas of science. The author, a researcher in higher education, has indeed compiled a huge database of articles from dozens of fields of science and tried to appraise their stylistic canons. The book is structured in short and engaging chapters each dealing with a specific issue (the title, the structure, creativity,...) and followed by a few "exercices" to improve one's style. After finishing this book, writing an academic paper seems more pleasurable as I am tempted to apply all I learnt from this book. </p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/217489-naeem"></a></section><section><p>381 reviews225 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/354892616">June 24, 2012</a></section><div><p>First, just read it. It is very well written (has to be, right?) and short. <p>Second, I think Sword is trying to free us to explore the gap between our daily persona and our academic self. You know: that self that is naturally vibrant, humorous,and gleeful vs. the academic drone we academics become. She frees us to inject a sense of fun and passion in our prose by providing examples, exercises, and arguments. And, she shows us the technical requirements of good writing. I hope to read this book every six months.</p><p>Good stuff.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1782141-elizabeth"></a></section><section><p>937 reviews</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/412468398">September 11, 2012</a></section><div><p>This is one of the best writing guides I've ever read, not only for usefully chronicling the trends of academic writing in several disciplines, but for its useful and pragmatic suggestions (compiled at the end of each chapter) for how to incorporate the author's lessons into writing practices. The suggestions range from the pragmatic to the creative, but all are practical ideas that, if implemented, would greatly contribute to the quality of writing in the academy. Do I think this will happen? Never. Do I hope to try it myself and encourage students to do the same? Absolutely.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1782141?shelf=2012">2012</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/53331360-jennifer"></a></section><section><p>165 reviews29 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2797285219">April 24, 2019</a></section><div><p>Engaging and helpful, filled with examples that illustrate both the suggested techniques and possible pitfalls Sword discusses.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/22109807-scott-pearson"></a></section><section><p>516 reviews18 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4327010938">January 15, 2022</a></section><div><p>Academic writing has a reputation for being a bit dry and only interested in the dissemination of abstract information. Concreteness, style, and vivacity often fall to the wayside. As Sword points out, much of this dryness is due to social structures, not deliberate mastery of the craft. This book teaches how to bring a sense of style to academic writing without compromising its informational purposes.<p>By examining 1,000 academic papers in ten different fields, Sword compiles a list of examples of good and bad practices. The style of writing is often dependent on one’s field of study. This style, in turn, is enforced culturally by educators and institutionally by editors of journals. Fortunately, by Sword’s analysis, many journals allow and encourage a lucid style. Why then does such a dry style persist among so many writers? People have been told, over and over again, that “this is just how it is.” Or they have been discouraged from taking risks by one or two people on dissertation or tenure committees.</p><p>Sword hopes to free us writers from those shadowy shackles by showing little ways to make communication more effective. There’s no inherent rule that academic writing has to be dry, and overly abstract writing is simply ineffective and bad, not helpful. Not every writer will feel freedom to try every suggested tool, but every reader should be able to come away with some new approach to try out. The biggest obstacles cited are fear and anxiety. The ten very different fields examined demonstrate style can be found everywhere – if we only would have the verve to use it.</p><p>The biggest shortcoming of this book lies in its format. I listened to it as an audiobook and found myself wanting to consult the examples visually. Many tangential pericopes fill the text – usually a good feature – but these were hard to follow audibly. I suspect reading the print version would solve this problem squarely.</p><p>Obviously, this book seeks to address communicators across many fields who write for academic audiences. Those who write for popular journals or newspapers may find this book of limited use. By using abundant examples, Sword’s study seeks to be relevant to basic sciences like medicine as much as the social sciences or even the humanities. When not used to excess but still not eschewed, style facilitates communication and makes academic studies full of more intrinsic impact. Though immensely important, academic words can lose lingering power by becoming drier than they have to be, but Sword teaches how to resuscitate them back to life.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/22109807?shelf=audiobook">audiobook</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/22109807?shelf=education-research">education-research</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/22109807?shelf=writing-communication">writing-communication</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/50921106-colin-cox"></a></section><section><p>415 reviews7 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2806698514">May 2, 2019</a></section><div><p>A spectre is haunting academia—the spectre of clarity. All the powers of the old Ivory Tower have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Editor and Department Chair, Tenure-Track Professor and Ph.D. Candidate, yadda yadda yadda. <p><i>Stylish Academic Writing</i> is a fine book even if far too much of it seems obvious. Funnily enough, the obviousness of Sword's book is precisely her point: academia knows it writes poorly and encourages poor writing, yet it fails to act. Swords offers several explanations for academia's lack of action: stale traditions, stubborn gatekeepers, and myopic individual interests, just to name a few. But as I read it, Sword believes that academia's inability to reflect, self assess, and evolve further exacerbates many of these problems. There are reasons to challenge Sword here. My department, for example, is riddled with self-assessment opportunities. My experience, like anyone's, is limited, but I cannot think of an academic who yearns for more self-assessment opportunities. Plus, disseminating academic writing to large audiences is hard. While sites like Academia.edu allow academics to distribute their work freely, paywalls are a cumbersome obstacle that reinforces certain divisions between scholars and the public, which in turn, might reinforce certain poor-writing practices.</p><p>Chapter 8, "The Story Net," is easily my favorite chapter in the book. Here, Sword encourages her reader to think of academic work as "a favorite book or movie" and to "distill its plot into a single sentence, and imagine what would happen if you plotted your research story along the same lines" (97). It's interesting to imagine "two seemingly incompatible theoretical concepts...brought into a single conceptual space" as a research project version of <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> (97-98). There is nothing new about pitting two conflicting ideas against one another, but Sword's framing of this process feels new. Plus, it potentially promotes interdisciplinary relationships. Would an economist or sociologist find clarity in thinking of their work as a non-fiction, researched-based appropriation of <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>? Sword seems to think so, and it undoubtedly cuts the other way.</p><p>There are moments to skip and skim in <i>Stylish Academic Writing</i>, but it's short and worth an afternoon of any academic's time.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/97151473-anson-cassel-mills"></a></section><section><p>559 reviews8 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2861820746">June 17, 2019</a></section><div><p>Sword’s advice for writing better academic prose isn’t novel, but it’s sound. As have other writing manuals, she urges scholars to reduce their adverbs, passives, “be” verbs, abstractions, nominalizations, prepositional phrases, and demonstrative pronouns. Her online diagnostic tool, “WritersDiet,” is an amusing way of becoming more aware of one’s own participation in the leaden style authorized by the academy.<p>Sword’s book also provides examples of good scholarly prose, some truly stylish and others at least acceptable, if not rousing. Sword herself writes well enough, though many of her sentences might be tweaked and tightened. For instance, the following paragraph (112) is both clear and amusing:</p><p>“Every discipline has its own specialized language, its membership rites, its secret handshake. I remember the moment when, as a PhD student in comparative literature, I casually dropped phrase “psychosexual morphology” into a discussion of a Thomas Hardy novel. What power! From the professor’s approving nod and the envious shuffling of my fellow students around the seminar table, I knew that I had just flashed the golden badge that admitted me into an elite disciplinary community. Needless to say, my new party trick fell flat on my nonacademic friends and relations. Whenever I solemnly intoned the word `Foucauldian,’ they quickly went off to find another beer.” (106 words)</p><p>Still, it could be tightened:</p><p>“Every discipline has its own specialized language, its secret code. When, as a PhD student in comparative literature, I casually dropped the phrase “psychosexual morphology” into a discussion of a Thomas Hardy novel, the professor’s approving nod and the envious shuffling of fellow students revealed that I had been welcomed into an elite academic community. Needless to say, the same trick did not work with non-academics. Solemnly intoning the word `Foucauldian’ sent them off after another beer.” (77 words)</p><p>As a historian, I think my real problem with this book is that I don’t want to write stylish academic prose. I want to write like David McCullough and Ron Chernow.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section></section></article></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 Stylish Academic Writing

 Helen Sword

 4.08
 883 ratings 114 reviews
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 Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where to begin, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books a pleasure to read and to write.

 Dispelling the myth that you cannot get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose, Sword shows how much journal editors and readers welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Sword s analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a wide range of fields documents a startling gap between how academics typically describe good writing and the turgid prose they regularly produce.

 "Stylish Academic Writing" showcases a range of scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.
 Genres Writing Nonfiction Academia Reference Academic Research Self Help
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 220 pages, Hardcover

 First published April 1, 2012

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 Helen Sword

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 4.08
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 Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews
 Michael Meeuwis
 315 reviews 1 follower
 May 10, 2015
 Under the guise of writing advice, this book recommends things that I have been taught to be bad intellectual practice. One of these is flat misrepresentation. The summary of Jonathan Culler's defense of Judith Butler's prose on pg. 156, for example, completely misrepresents what Culler is saying: he doesn't say that Butler presents a "merry-go-round," prosodically, but rather tries to help the reader with abstruse concepts by repeating them several times. There are a number of other serious problems here. Many of the writers Sword cites are public intellectuals on the Richard Dawkins or Stephen Greenblatt level; simply put, these are writers who are trying to engage a broader public, and are as a result writing in their recent work in a less rigorous style. Which is exactly the point, maybe, about scholars at that point in their careers--although Greenblatt in particular is a much more nuanced and (yes) jargon-creating writing than Sword gives him credit for being. This is to his credit, not to his detriment.

 Saying that academic writing is bad isn't even shooting fish in a barrel--or if it is, it's doing so with orbital missile systems. Part of the reason for this is that 90% of all writing is bad; if anything, academics are more reflective about this than other writers. With that nevertheless as given, Sword recommends many things--jokes, overly-personal anecdotes, elaborate figurative language--that reviewers have told me to specifically remove from my journal articles. By citing figures at the peak of their careers, she is citing people whose work is often edited in different ways.

 With that said, there are good points. Derrida and Foucault tend to be clearer and cannier than those who cite them excessively; this might be why they were the two most-cited academics of their generation. Why we need someone else saying this is beyond me.

 The most useful points of this book, its occasional listing of concrete suggestions for improving writing, would most usefully have been printed on a two-sided laminated sheet of paper, which might be pinned up by one's computer. There is a lot of verbiage, star-fucking, and a kind of curdled distaste for people trying to do new things--which often relates in awkward prose, often the site of the unformed but fascinated idea--getting in the way of this laminated sheet. This twaddle is coupled with a lack of genuinely new ideas. Telling someone to ask what the "main point" of their article is is something I learned around the third grade; although it is nice to be reminded to do this from time to time, it is not pleasant to do so in prose this high-handed and, frequently, cliched ("clarity and complexity are bedfellows, not rivals," "An effective first paragraph...must...make the reader want to keep reading," "captures our imagination," etc. etc. ad infinitum.)

 The hell of it is: if you skim this like a Florida airboat, you will probably become aware of three or four categories of writing improvement that might help you. Write these down, pin 'em to your desk, and forget how Stephen Greenblatt wrote his articles. You have your own ideas to struggle with, and your own voice to find. You're not going to find that in this Whitman's Sampler of cack-handedly obvious cliches.
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 Craig
 59 reviews 18 followers
 June 17, 2022
 On the one hand, a lot of this is nothing new. The book encourages writers to peek over the disciplinary fences and draw from what scholars are doing in other fields. It tells its readers that their academic work can be both complex and also clear and concrete. It grants permission to use the personal pronoun. It celebrates the short, forceful phrase as an alternative to the long, turgid, labyrinthine sentence. It suggests titling things in eye-catching ways and working hooks into openings. It promotes the frequent use of examples. It proposes the sparing and judicious use of jargon. It encourages a lightly experimental approach to structure and form. Its six “ideals,” its “Cs”— communication , craft , creativity , concreteness , choice , and courage —are straightforward.

 On the other hand, one thing that sets the book apart is the extent to which its research foundation, the set of hand-selected, discipline-exemplary journals from which Sword draws both qualitive and indeed quantitative evidence for her writing analyses, is thorough, detailed, and made helpfully explicit in an appendix. There’s a firm grounding in specifics and illustrative examples throughout (Sword often takes her own advice, to her credit), though these can also lead to significant problems with a kind of audience confusion. One of the strongest chapters in the book, the one on abstracts of various kinds (“The Big Picture”), does acknowledge the importance of fitness for purpose and venue, but the rest of the book’s advice seems at times to work with an unhelpfully lazy definition of “academic writing” and its individual and institutional audiences. Does a famous, popular public intellectual like Richard Dawkins have the same audience as a scholar publishing in a narrowcast specialist academic journal? How transferrable are the insights from the former to the latter context really? Is “do what works for the widely published, internationally feted, and award-winning” actually good, practicable advice for anonymous early-career scholars buying writing guides on their nearly-maxed-out credit cards?

 Speaking of audience, it seems to me that if you follow Sword’s advice about including personal narratives, anecdotes, poeticisms and other creative flourishes in your scholarly work, a lot of the time what you’ll produce will at best be simply cut and at worst be grounds for a rejected submission. I can’t help thinking that like so much writing advice, this all seems written mainly for the one audience that doesn’t ultimately need it: in this case, academics who are already successful enough and have advanced far enough that their bold moves might be published with a degree of editorial lightness and generosity that would be unreasonable for a rookie to expect.

 And some of the advice just seems mad to try to follow. Should we lay bare the “methodological prejudices [that] lurk just below the surface of any academic text” (135) by, for example, “disrupt[ing] normative elements such as citation styles” so that we can “send those unspoken assumptions scurrying out into the light” as we write and submit articles with our fingers crossed for publication and career advancement? How big will this kind of thing really go over with the editors over at the Journal of Finicky Traditionalist Studies brandishing their copies of the house-style guide? Sword waves away concerns about institutional gatekeepers, but they’re real, and we seem to have to take them ever more seriously the more unforgivingly, relentlessly competitive the professional bloodbath of academe gets.

 I don’t know that this will leave you as inspired as some of the other reviews here suggest, or that feelings of inspiration will long survive some of the responses you’ll get when you start doing what Sword suggests. But the book urges you to consider that there are other ways of writing for a scholarly audience than the ones you tend to see in action, that it’s worth being on the lookout for creative opportunities and having the courage to take them, and that academic prose should be a lot more pleasurable than it usually is to write and to read. Given what most academic writing is like, these things are inspiring.
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 Chris
 212 reviews 44 followers
 March 2, 2016
 As a longtime part-time graduate student and employee of a university research center (often in an editing or writing capacity), I found that this book 1) confirmed and affirmed my (negative) perceptions of much scholarly writing, and 2) provided lots of evidence from many fields of how it has been and can be done better. (Really!) Sword raided journals from a wide spectrum of disciplines and found even more problems than I've seen, and but also many examples of concrete, specific, engaging scholarly writing. She uses those to illustrate her many tips for better scholarly writing. To be a scholar is to care deeply about one small corner of the world, and all of us want to inspire others to care about it, too. It's impossible to read this book and not get at least a dozen ideas for how to do that better.

 Other reviewers have noted that they plan to share it with their grad students--I plan to tell my graduate adviser about it. :)
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 Tara Brabazon
 Author 22 books 318 followers
 January 30, 2020
 What a truly remarkable book. Further, this is is an incredibly courageous book. Any academic - every academic - will think differently about scholarly writing at the conclusion of this book.

 Importantly, assumptions are not allowed to stand. Analyses of refereed journal articles in a great diversity of disciplines shows that - wait for it - scientists use "I" or "we" more frequently than humanities cholars in their research.

 For PhD students in particular, this is an empowering book. This book offers a way to be different and to write differently. Outstanding.
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 Jennifer
 1,619 reviews 52 followers
 November 23, 2014
 E. F. Schumacher once wrote that any intelligent fool could make things bigger and more complex, but that it took a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing displays just the genius necessary to inspire academics to get up their courage to free their writing of the jargon-heavy passivity choking the life out of it (and their readers).

 Unlike other guides, Sword brings massive research to bear on the 'problem' of academic writing: the first part of her work describes how she analyzed one thousand academic articles across ten different disciplines, as well as books and articles by one hundred academic writers recommended by their peers for the quality of their writing, and one hundred recently published style guides for academic writers in order to draw her conclusions. When was the last time you read a writing guide that devoted three full chapters to methodology?

 From there, Sword goes on to explore eleven techniques displayed by stylish writers across the disciplines she studied, and each chapter contains both specific examples, good and bad, and simple directives for practices readers can use to improve their own writing. It's all so elegant that Strunk and White (who do get name-dropped several times throughout) would weep with joy.

 Sword acknowledges that academic writing concerns itself with difficult, sometimes abstruse topics, and that sometimes jargon and nominalizations are appropriate to the task at hand. But smart, she argues, doesn't have to mean stultifying. Here's hoping publishing academics find her as persuasive as I did.

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 Jess
 16 reviews
 May 11, 2013
 This was only okay. The best parts are the exercises at the end of each chapter, really. The text itself is unfocused. The author can't seem to use an example to demonstrate fewer than three different points, two of them inevitably off-topic for the chapter. She tries to do too much with each one, and the result is that they seem carelessly selected. She also fails to transition between topics; most of the text reads like a list of descriptions of stylistic features and is often long-winded, using lots of unnecessary metaphor and colourful language that doesn't add to the meaning or pleasure of reading. She also makes the ridiculous choice to devote an entire chapter to discussing snappy titles and another to snappy section headings. Use Stylish Academic Writing to point you in the direction of some great writers from different fields of study, but otherwise it's a pass.
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 Lectus
 1,029 reviews 30 followers
 December 20, 2013
 Unfortunately, the book is exactly what Sword criticizes scholarly writing is about but shouldn't be: "stodgy, jargon-laden, abstract prose that ignores or defies most of the stylistic principles outlined" (p. 3). Her own book is "a compulsive proclivity for discursive obscurantism and circumambulatory diction" (p. 3).

 In other words, the books is confusing; I was just lost, and didn't get anything from it. Sword did superb research of other people's writing. Maybe too much research. She got lost in the same thing she was trying to teach us to avoid.

 In fact, I hated doing this, but I returned the book and asked for a refund.
 4 likes
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 Todd Miles
 Author 3 books 128 followers
 December 6, 2021
 A surprisingly (given the subject) helpful and engaging book. She practices what she preaches. This is a keeper for my Research Methods class.
 academic-research-methods
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 Paul
 83 reviews 2 followers
 October 22, 2013
 Pretty good. Sword writes clearly -- if she didn't, she'd be like a dentist with bad teeth -- and challenges the reader to write whatever they're writing with readability as the ultimate goal. Depending on the field you work in, you might be more or less able to try her many suggestions for writing more stylish academic prose.

 I feel she under-emphasizes one important tool for creating better writing: rewriting. A piece should go through revisons, and perhaps many revisions, before being considered fit for public consumption. Sword doesn't give the reader a good sense of just how much blood, sweat, and tears should go into an article about hematology, excerise physiology, or romantic poetry.

 Overall, though, if you're fed up reading awfully-written articles and don't want to be producing such articles, "Stylish Academic Writing" will give you some good ideas.
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 Beth Sullivan
 68 reviews
 November 5, 2022
 It was a well-researched book. I’ll give it that.

 And I did agree with her apt descriptions of academic writing. As an academic editor, I found myself nodding and agreeing with her descriptions.

 However, the book was a bit of a slog for me. And as her book is about writing engagingly, it’s ironic to me that it did not keep me engaged.
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 U Recife
 122 reviews 12 followers
 June 18, 2018
 The title gives you little doubt on what this book is about. If you picked it up, you already know what you are looking for and what you might expect from reading it. However, this is not exactly a manual on how to do it. It’s more of a survey of what others have done (or are doing) as a way to entice you to break from the oftentimes dogmatic pressure to keep in line with the untold stylistic rules of academic production that seem to govern your discipline.

 Helen Sword does a great job in covering the many aspects of academic text production with insightful comments and very enlightening examples. Every bit of text quoted here serves exactly the function it purports to do, i.e., to back up what is being proposed, or criticized, with what is being practiced by the many academic authors in the different fields surveyed in this study of hers.

 It’s also important to point out that Helen Sword doesn’t just limit this work to a theoretical critique of the many academic stylistic writing practices, good or bad, but also offers good advice on how to achieve better results with one’s own academic written production. On the second part of this book, aptly titled The Elements of Stylishness , Sword finishes all the chapters with an interesting practical section of Things to Try . Here you’ll find all sorts of good ideas on what you can do try out and achieve the same good stylistic results analyzed on the chapter that you have just read. This is immensely useful if you really need to break from all the old habits that prevent you to get the best results with your academic writing.

 From all that has been said above, and given that this is a very targeted book (its readers have a clear idea of what to expect), to recommend it is a futile exercise: If you need it, you know you should read it. Your skills as a more versatile, enticing, and clear academic writer will definitely improve.
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 Andrew
 Author 15 books 37 followers
 February 26, 2014
 Helen Sword rips the veil off one of the worst kept secrets in all of academia: Most academic writing is just plain awful. Jargon-filled, abstract, impersonal, sleep-inducing.

 What makes Sword's Stylish Academic Writing different is that she has data to back up her claims. She studied five hundred recent articles from academic journals evenly spread over ten different disciplines. For example, she actually counted first-person pronouns (historians being culpable for using the fewest) and abstract nouns (e.g., nominalization--those in higher ed being most guilty of this infraction).

 The good news is--the news is not all bad! Science writers actually used the pronouns "I" and "we" quite a bit. Historians rarely used abstract nouns.

 There was hope on another front. Sword not only studied journal articles but also the advice found in the guidelines for writers issued by the journals. They all tended to advocate:

 The three C's--clarity, coherence, conciseness
 Including some short and some long sentences
 Plain English
 Precision
 Active verbs
 Telling a story

 There was, however, less consensus on:

 Personal pronouns
 Careful use of jargon
 Personal voice
 Creative expression
 Non-standard structure
 Engaging titles

 In another twist, she analyzes the writing itself in the guidelines for writers the journals created. Again, on the one hand we get a mix of creative use of metaphor, humor, word play and other engaging techniques, while on the other hand we find styles of writing that are, yes, academic and stodgy.

 Conclusion: yes, convention remains a powerful force that shapes most academic writing. But within every discipline there is latitude for and actual published examples of good, interesting, stylish writing.
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 Carmen
 22 reviews
 July 25, 2021
 The negative reviews are an absolute mystery to me. This book offers:

 1) enlightened and detailed analyses of excellent and bad writing throughout various disciplines
 2) concrete and original advice and prompts for your own writing
 3) all of which is based on a study of the writing style in academic journals that the writer herself conducted *plus* on an analysis of the advice given in a number of writing guides.

 At the same time it's extremely well written, creatively structured, and in itself an example of the same good writing habits that the author pleads for. I have to add, it took me much longer to finish it than I had expected, because it's so dense in input.

 If you're thinking about getting a guide for academic writing: get this book instead.
 on-writing
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 Garrett
 6 reviews 2 followers
 August 1, 2017
 I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. As a graduate student in biology, I'm constantly struggling to find my voice in an objectively driven writing world. Sward does a great job at highlighting the how stylish academic writers can still be engaging and educational at the same time. It was actually difficult to get through the book because ideas for my own research writing kept bubbling up. The tips and tricks at the end of each chapter are often simple exercises to help expand your own writing style.

 I recommend this book to any academic writer —especially those in the hard sciences— looking to add voice, substance, or inspiration to a typically dry writing style.
 guide-books-technical
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 Jessica Zu
 1,072 reviews 124 followers
 January 10, 2013
 Strongly recommend to any academics who wants real people to read and care about their research.
 howtowrite leisure
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 Wagner Floriani
 110 reviews 15 followers
 January 14, 2020
 Excellent guidance. Beautifully expressed. Will revisit often!
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 Jules
 88 reviews 62 followers
 December 24, 2019
 The Sword is mightier than the pen.

 Helen Sword demystifies the rules around academic writing and shares thoughts on how those assumptions have come to be. Sword has a beautiful way of coaching the reader to understand the intention of their writings. The book begins with some digestible research across multiple disciplines. She share some clear metrics to help the academic writer see the trends in their silo. I was moved by her arguments for accessible writing as a way of bringing the academy together.

 The chapters flow from academic culture to how writing resources are informed. Sword does an excellent job showcasing the conventions and offers some opportunities to innovate. I was impressed by the spotlights that demonstrate how to assembly of stylish academic writing. A fantastic book with lots of great resources.
 leadership
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 Yassir Morsi
 Author 4 books 56 followers
 August 10, 2022
 Helen Sword claims Stylish Academic Writing is “at best an oxymoron and at worst a risky business”. So why should academics accessorise their "research with gratuitous stylistic flourishes?" In Stylish Academic Writing , Sword defends the claim “that elegant ideas deserve elegant expression”. And “intellectual creativity thrives best in an atmosphere of experimentation rather than conformity”.

 I enjoyed the book, as an academic who long resisted both the “Academese” and “Westernese” that crippled my discipline (politics). These two terms capture how too often, social scientists are expected to use approved Western secular jargon as advertising both their brand and entry into an intellectual club.

 This book showcases the work of academic writers from across disciplines who stretch and break disciplinary moulds. Highly recommended for any academic who struggles with writing in an inauthentic voice.

 writing-methodology
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 Alex Kissling
 9 reviews 1 follower
 December 5, 2019
 3.5- some good examples but a lot about rejecting conventional structure that I didn’t necessarily agree with. However, I really liked her examples of how to explain abstract ideas in more concrete ways.
 writing
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 Shane Williamson
 141 reviews 32 followers
 December 12, 2022
 2022 reads: 25

 Rating: 3.5 stars

 [Read for the Graduate Research Seminar at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary]
 writing-research
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 Marleen
 34 reviews
 July 22, 2019
 Wonderfully written with lots of examples and suggestions. Loved the "things to try" at the end of the chapters.
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 Joe
 524 reviews
 July 20, 2012
 An intriguing blend of research, advice, and cheerleading. Sword is interested in the range of stylistic choices open to academic writers—and why they so seldom take advantage of them. She conducts four kinds of research: (1) a survey of what colleagues see as stylish writing in their fields, (2) an analysis of about 100 books mentioned by them as stylish, (3) an analysis of 1000 typical articles across disciplines, and (4) an analysis of the advice given by authors of style manuals. Oddly, though, this ambitious research program only gets about 1/3 of the pages in her book; the rest is devoted to fairly familiar advice about writing concrete, jargon-free prose. Too bad. But still, a much more interesting book on style than usual. I read it in a single sitting.
 writing
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 Olivier
 69 reviews 9 followers
 September 29, 2012
 This is not really an academic style manual. Rather than presenting a list of "tips" and recommendations, it presents examples of "good" writing by writers from all areas of science. The author, a researcher in higher education, has indeed compiled a huge database of articles from dozens of fields of science and tried to appraise their stylistic canons. The book is structured in short and engaging chapters each dealing with a specific issue (the title, the structure, creativity,...) and followed by a few "exercices" to improve one's style. After finishing this book, writing an academic paper seems more pleasurable as I am tempted to apply all I learnt from this book.
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 Naeem
 381 reviews 225 followers
 June 24, 2012
 First, just read it. It is very well written (has to be, right?) and short.

 Second, I think Sword is trying to free us to explore the gap between our daily persona and our academic self. You know: that self that is naturally vibrant, humorous,and gleeful vs. the academic drone we academics become. She frees us to inject a sense of fun and passion in our prose by providing examples, exercises, and arguments. And, she shows us the technical requirements of good writing. I hope to read this book every six months.

 Good stuff.

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 Elizabeth
 937 reviews
 September 11, 2012
 This is one of the best writing guides I've ever read, not only for usefully chronicling the trends of academic writing in several disciplines, but for its useful and pragmatic suggestions (compiled at the end of each chapter) for how to incorporate the author's lessons into writing practices. The suggestions range from the pragmatic to the creative, but all are practical ideas that, if implemented, would greatly contribute to the quality of writing in the academy. Do I think this will happen? Never. Do I hope to try it myself and encourage students to do the same? Absolutely.
 2012
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 Olwen
 744 reviews 12 followers
 June 19, 2022
 Yes! Why can't academic texts be readable!
 writing
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 Jennifer
 165 reviews 29 followers
 April 24, 2019
 Engaging and helpful, filled with examples that illustrate both the suggested techniques and possible pitfalls Sword discusses.
 1 like
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 Scott Pearson
 516 reviews 18 followers
 January 15, 2022
 Academic writing has a reputation for being a bit dry and only interested in the dissemination of abstract information. Concreteness, style, and vivacity often fall to the wayside. As Sword points out, much of this dryness is due to social structures, not deliberate mastery of the craft. This book teaches how to bring a sense of style to academic writing without compromising its informational purposes.

 By examining 1,000 academic papers in ten different fields, Sword compiles a list of examples of good and bad practices. The style of writing is often dependent on one’s field of study. This style, in turn, is enforced culturally by educators and institutionally by editors of journals. Fortunately, by Sword’s analysis, many journals allow and encourage a lucid style. Why then does such a dry style persist among so many writers? People have been told, over and over again, that “this is just how it is.” Or they have been discouraged from taking risks by one or two people on dissertation or tenure committees.

 Sword hopes to free us writers from those shadowy shackles by showing little ways to make communication more effective. There’s no inherent rule that academic writing has to be dry, and overly abstract writing is simply ineffective and bad, not helpful. Not every writer will feel freedom to try every suggested tool, but every reader should be able to come away with some new approach to try out. The biggest obstacles cited are fear and anxiety. The ten very different fields examined demonstrate style can be found everywhere – if we only would have the verve to use it.

 The biggest shortcoming of this book lies in its format. I listened to it as an audiobook and found myself wanting to consult the examples visually. Many tangential pericopes fill the text – usually a good feature – but these were hard to follow audibly. I suspect reading the print version would solve this problem squarely.

 Obviously, this book seeks to address communicators across many fields who write for academic audiences. Those who write for popular journals or newspapers may find this book of limited use. By using abundant examples, Sword’s study seeks to be relevant to basic sciences like medicine as much as the social sciences or even the humanities. When not used to excess but still not eschewed, style facilitates communication and makes academic studies full of more intrinsic impact. Though immensely important, academic words can lose lingering power by becoming drier than they have to be, but Sword teaches how to resuscitate them back to life.
 audiobook education-research writing-communication
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 Colin Cox
 415 reviews 7 followers
 May 2, 2019
 A spectre is haunting academia—the spectre of clarity. All the powers of the old Ivory Tower have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Editor and Department Chair, Tenure-Track Professor and Ph.D. Candidate, yadda yadda yadda.

 Stylish Academic Writing is a fine book even if far too much of it seems obvious. Funnily enough, the obviousness of Sword's book is precisely her point: academia knows it writes poorly and encourages poor writing, yet it fails to act. Swords offers several explanations for academia's lack of action: stale traditions, stubborn gatekeepers, and myopic individual interests, just to name a few. But as I read it, Sword believes that academia's inability to reflect, self assess, and evolve further exacerbates many of these problems. There are reasons to challenge Sword here. My department, for example, is riddled with self-assessment opportunities. My experience, like anyone's, is limited, but I cannot think of an academic who yearns for more self-assessment opportunities. Plus, disseminating academic writing to large audiences is hard. While sites like Academia.edu allow academics to distribute their work freely, paywalls are a cumbersome obstacle that reinforces certain divisions between scholars and the public, which in turn, might reinforce certain poor-writing practices.

 Chapter 8, "The Story Net," is easily my favorite chapter in the book. Here, Sword encourages her reader to think of academic work as "a favorite book or movie" and to "distill its plot into a single sentence, and imagine what would happen if you plotted your research story along the same lines" (97). It's interesting to imagine "two seemingly incompatible theoretical concepts...brought into a single conceptual space" as a research project version of Pride and Prejudice (97-98). There is nothing new about pitting two conflicting ideas against one another, but Sword's framing of this process feels new. Plus, it potentially promotes interdisciplinary relationships. Would an economist or sociologist find clarity in thinking of their work as a non-fiction, researched-based appropriation of Pride and Prejudice ? Sword seems to think so, and it undoubtedly cuts the other way.

 There are moments to skip and skim in Stylish Academic Writing , but it's short and worth an afternoon of any academic's time.
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 Anson Cassel Mills
 559 reviews 8 followers
 June 17, 2019
 Sword’s advice for writing better academic prose isn’t novel, but it’s sound. As have other writing manuals, she urges scholars to reduce their adverbs, passives, “be” verbs, abstractions, nominalizations, prepositional phrases, and demonstrative pronouns. Her online diagnostic tool, “WritersDiet,” is an amusing way of becoming more aware of one’s own participation in the leaden style authorized by the academy.

 Sword’s book also provides examples of good scholarly prose, some truly stylish and others at least acceptable, if not rousing. Sword herself writes well enough, though many of her sentences might be tweaked and tightened. For instance, the following paragraph (112) is both clear and amusing:

 “Every discipline has its own specialized language, its membership rites, its secret handshake. I remember the moment when, as a PhD student in comparative literature, I casually dropped phrase “psychosexual morphology” into a discussion of a Thomas Hardy novel. What power! From the professor’s approving nod and the envious shuffling of my fellow students around the seminar table, I knew that I had just flashed the golden badge that admitted me into an elite disciplinary community. Needless to say, my new party trick fell flat on my nonacademic friends and relations. Whenever I solemnly intoned the word `Foucauldian,’ they quickly went off to find another beer.” (106 words)

 Still, it could be tightened:

 “Every discipline has its own specialized language, its secret code. When, as a PhD student in comparative literature, I casually dropped the phrase “psychosexual morphology” into a discussion of a Thomas Hardy novel, the professor’s approving nod and the envious shuffling of fellow students revealed that I had been welcomed into an elite academic community. Needless to say, the same trick did not work with non-academics. Solemnly intoning the word `Foucauldian’ sent them off after another beer.” (77 words)

 As a historian, I think my real problem with this book is that I don’t want to write stylish academic prose. I want to write like David McCullough and Ron Chernow.

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315 reviews1 follower     May 10, 2015   Under the guise of writing advice, this book recommends things that I have been taught to be bad intellectual practice. One of these is flat misrepresentation. The summary of Jonathan Culler's defense of Judith Butler's prose on pg. 156, for example, completely misrepresents what Culler is saying: he doesn't say that Butler presents a "merry-go-round," prosodically, but rather tries to help the reader with abstruse concepts by repeating them several times. There are a number of other serious problems here. Many of the writers Sword cites are public intellectuals on the Richard Dawkins or Stephen Greenblatt level; simply put, these are writers who are trying to engage a broader public, and are as a result writing in their recent work in a less rigorous style. Which is exactly the point, maybe, about scholars at that point in their careers--although Greenblatt in particular is a much more nuanced and (yes) jargon-creating writing than Sword gives him credit for being. This is to his credit, not to his detriment. Saying that academic writing is bad isn't even shooting fish in a barrel--or if it is, it's doing so with orbital missile systems. Part of the reason for this is that 90% of all writing is bad; if anything, academics are more reflective about this than other writers. With that nevertheless as given, Sword recommends many things--jokes, overly-personal anecdotes, elaborate figurative language--that reviewers have told me to specifically remove from my journal articles. By citing figures at the peak of their careers, she is citing people whose work is often edited in different ways.  With that said, there are good points. Derrida and Foucault tend to be clearer and cannier than those who cite them excessively; this might be why they were the two most-cited academics of their generation. Why we need someone else saying this is beyond me. The most useful points of this book, its occasional listing of concrete suggestions for improving writing, would most usefully have been printed on a two-sided laminated sheet of paper, which might be pinned up by one's computer. There is a lot of verbiage, star-fucking, and a kind of curdled distaste for people trying to do new things--which often relates in awkward prose, often the site of the unformed but fascinated idea--getting in the way of this laminated sheet. This twaddle is coupled with a lack of genuinely new ideas. Telling someone to ask what the "main point" of their article is is something I learned around the third grade; although it is nice to be reminded to do this from time to time, it is not pleasant to do so in prose this high-handed and, frequently, cliched ("clarity and complexity are bedfellows, not rivals," "An effective first paragraph...must...make the reader want to keep reading," "captures our imagination," etc. etc. ad infinitum.) The hell of it is: if you skim this like a Florida airboat, you will probably become aware of three or four categories of writing improvement that might help you. Write these down, pin 'em to your desk, and forget how Stephen Greenblatt wrote his articles. You have your own ideas to struggle with, and your own voice to find. You're not going to find that in this Whitman's Sampler of cack-handedly obvious cliches.                   59 reviews18 followers     June 17, 2022   On the one hand, a lot of this is nothing new. The book encourages writers to peek over the disciplinary fences and draw from what scholars are doing in other fields. It tells its readers that their academic work can be both complex and also clear and concrete. It grants permission to use the personal pronoun. It celebrates the short, forceful phrase as an alternative to the long, turgid, labyrinthine sentence. It suggests titling things in eye-catching ways and working hooks into openings. It promotes the frequent use of examples. It proposes the sparing and judicious use of jargon. It encourages a lightly experimental approach to structure and form. Its six “ideals,” its “Cs”—communication, craft, creativity, concreteness, choice, and courage—are straightforward.On the other hand, one thing that sets the book apart is the extent to which its research foundation, the set of hand-selected, discipline-exemplary journals from which Sword draws both qualitive and indeed quantitative evidence for her writing analyses, is thorough, detailed, and made helpfully explicit in an appendix. There’s a firm grounding in specifics and illustrative examples throughout (Sword often takes her own advice, to her credit), though these can also lead to significant problems with a kind of audience confusion. One of the strongest chapters in the book, the one on abstracts of various kinds (“The Big Picture”), does acknowledge the importance of fitness for purpose and venue, but the rest of the book’s advice seems at times to work with an unhelpfully lazy definition of “academic writing” and its individual and institutional audiences. Does a famous, popular public intellectual like Richard Dawkins have the same audience as a scholar publishing in a narrowcast specialist academic journal? How transferrable are the insights from the former to the latter context really? Is “do what works for the widely published, internationally feted, and award-winning” actually good, practicable advice for anonymous early-career scholars buying writing guides on their nearly-maxed-out credit cards? Speaking of audience, it seems to me that if you follow Sword’s advice about including personal narratives, anecdotes, poeticisms and other creative flourishes in your scholarly work, a lot of the time what you’ll produce will at best be simply cut and at worst be grounds for a rejected submission. I can’t help thinking that like so much writing advice, this all seems written mainly for the one audience that doesn’t ultimately need it: in this case, academics who are already successful enough and have advanced far enough that their bold moves might be published with a degree of editorial lightness and generosity that would be unreasonable for a rookie to expect. And some of the advice just seems mad to try to follow. Should we lay bare the “methodological prejudices [that] lurk just below the surface of any academic text” (135) by, for example, “disrupt[ing] normative elements such as citation styles” so that we can “send those unspoken assumptions scurrying out into the light” as we write and submit articles with our fingers crossed for publication and career advancement? How big will this kind of thing really go over with the editors over at the Journal of Finicky Traditionalist Studies brandishing their copies of the house-style guide? Sword waves away concerns about institutional gatekeepers, but they’re real, and we seem to have to take them ever more seriously the more unforgivingly, relentlessly competitive the professional bloodbath of academe gets. I don’t know that this will leave you as inspired as some of the other reviews here suggest, or that feelings of inspiration will long survive some of the responses you’ll get when you start doing what Sword suggests. But the book urges you to consider that there are other ways of writing for a scholarly audience than the ones you tend to see in action, that it’s worth being on the lookout for creative opportunities and having the courage to take them, and that academic prose should be a lot more pleasurable than it usually is to write and to read. Given what most academic writing is like, these things are inspiring.                   212 reviews44 followers     March 2, 2016   As a longtime part-time graduate student and employee of a university research center (often in an editing or writing capacity), I found that this book 1) confirmed and affirmed my (negative) perceptions of much scholarly writing, and 2) provided lots of evidence from many fields of how it has been and can be done better. (Really!) Sword raided journals from a wide spectrum of disciplines and found even more problems than I've seen, and but also many examples of concrete, specific, engaging scholarly writing. She uses those to illustrate her many tips for better scholarly writing. To be a scholar is to care deeply about one small corner of the world, and all of us want to inspire others to care about it, too. It's impossible to read this book and not get at least a dozen ideas for how to do that better. Other reviewers have noted that they plan to share it with their grad students--I plan to tell my graduate adviser about it. :)     higher-ed               Author  22 books318 followers     January 30, 2020   What a truly remarkable book. Further, this is is an incredibly courageous book. Any academic - every academic - will think differently about scholarly writing at the conclusion of this book.Importantly, assumptions are not allowed to stand. Analyses of refereed journal articles in a great diversity of disciplines shows that - wait for it - scientists use "I" or "we" more frequently than humanities cholars in their research.  For PhD students in particular, this is an empowering book. This book offers a way to be different and to write differently. Outstanding.                    1,619 reviews52 followers     November 23, 2014   E. F. Schumacher once wrote that any intelligent fool could make things bigger and more complex, but that it took a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing displays just the genius necessary to inspire academics to get up their courage to free their writing of the jargon-heavy passivity choking the life out of it (and their readers).Unlike other guides, Sword brings massive research to bear on the 'problem' of academic writing: the first part of her work describes how she analyzed one thousand academic articles across ten different disciplines, as well as books and articles by one hundred academic writers recommended by their peers for the quality of their writing, and one hundred recently published style guides for academic writers in order to draw her conclusions. When was the last time you read a writing guide that devoted three full chapters to methodology? From there, Sword goes on to explore eleven techniques displayed by stylish writers across the disciplines she studied, and each chapter contains both specific examples, good and bad, and simple directives for practices readers can use to improve their own writing. It's all so elegant that Strunk and White (who do get name-dropped several times throughout) would weep with joy. Sword acknowledges that academic writing concerns itself with difficult, sometimes abstruse topics, and that sometimes jargon and nominalizations are appropriate to the task at hand. But smart, she argues, doesn't have to mean stultifying. Here's hoping publishing academics find her as persuasive as I did.      2014-reads           May 11, 2013   This was only okay. The best parts are the exercises at the end of each chapter, really. The text itself is unfocused. The author can't seem to use an example to demonstrate fewer than three different points, two of them inevitably off-topic for the chapter. She tries to do too much with each one, and the result is that they seem carelessly selected. She also fails to transition between topics; most of the text reads like a list of descriptions of stylistic features and is often long-winded, using lots of unnecessary metaphor and colourful language that doesn't add to the meaning or pleasure of reading. She also makes the ridiculous choice to devote an entire chapter to discussing snappy titles and another to snappy section headings. Use Stylish Academic Writing to point you in the direction of some great writers from different fields of study, but otherwise it's a pass.                  1,029 reviews30 followers     December 20, 2013   Unfortunately, the book is exactly what Sword criticizes scholarly writing is about but shouldn't be: "stodgy, jargon-laden, abstract prose that ignores or defies most of the stylistic principles outlined" (p. 3). Her own book is "a compulsive proclivity for discursive obscurantism and circumambulatory diction" (p. 3). In other words, the books is confusing; I was just lost, and didn't get anything from it. Sword did superb research of other people's writing. Maybe too much research. She got lost in the same thing she was trying to teach us to avoid.  In fact, I hated doing this, but I returned the book and asked for a refund.                   Author  3 books128 followers     December 6, 2021   A surprisingly (given the subject) helpful and engaging book. She practices what she preaches. This is a keeper for my Research Methods class.    academic-research-methods           October 22, 2013   Pretty good. Sword writes clearly -- if she didn't, she'd be like a dentist with bad teeth -- and challenges the reader to write whatever they're writing with readability as the ultimate goal. Depending on the field you work in, you might be more or less able to try her many suggestions for writing more stylish academic prose.I feel she under-emphasizes one important tool for creating better writing: rewriting. A piece should go through revisons, and perhaps many revisions, before being considered fit for public consumption. Sword doesn't give the reader a good sense of just how much blood, sweat, and tears should go into an article about hematology, excerise physiology, or romantic poetry. Overall, though, if you're fed up reading awfully-written articles and don't want to be producing such articles, "Stylish Academic Writing" will give you some good ideas.                   68 reviews     November 5, 2022   It was a well-researched book. I’ll give it that. And I did agree with her apt descriptions of academic writing. As an academic editor, I found myself nodding and agreeing with her descriptions.  However, the book was a bit of a slog for me. And as her book is about writing engagingly, it’s ironic to me that it did not keep me engaged.                    122 reviews12 followers     June 18, 2018   The title gives you little doubt on what this book is about. If you picked it up, you already know what you are looking for and what you might expect from reading it. However, this is not exactly a manual on how to do it. It’s more of a survey of what others have done (or are doing) as a way to entice you to break from the oftentimes dogmatic pressure to keep in line with the untold stylistic rules of academic production that seem to govern your discipline. Helen Sword does a great job in covering the many aspects of academic text production with insightful comments and very enlightening examples. Every bit of text quoted here serves exactly the function it purports to do, i.e., to back up what is being proposed, or criticized, with what is being practiced by the many academic authors in the different fields surveyed in this study of hers. It’s also important to point out that Helen Sword doesn’t just limit this work to a theoretical critique of the many academic stylistic writing practices, good or bad, but also offers good advice on how to achieve better results with one’s own academic written production. On the second part of this book, aptly titled The Elements of Stylishness, Sword finishes all the chapters with an interesting practical section of Things to Try. Here you’ll find all sorts of good ideas on what you can do try out and achieve the same good stylistic results analyzed on the chapter that you have just read. This is immensely useful if you really need to break from all the old habits that prevent you to get the best results with your academic writing. From all that has been said above, and given that this is a very targeted book (its readers have a clear idea of what to expect), to recommend it is a futile exercise: If you need it, you know you should read it. Your skills as a more versatile, enticing, and clear academic writer will definitely improve.                    Author  15 books37 followers     February 26, 2014   Helen Sword rips the veil off one of the worst kept secrets in all of academia: Most academic writing is just plain awful. Jargon-filled, abstract, impersonal, sleep-inducing.What makes Sword's Stylish Academic Writing different is that she has data to back up her claims. She studied five hundred recent articles from academic journals evenly spread over ten different disciplines. For example, she actually counted first-person pronouns (historians being culpable for using the fewest) and abstract nouns (e.g., nominalization--those in higher ed being most guilty of this infraction). The good news is--the news is not all bad! Science writers actually used the pronouns "I" and "we" quite a bit. Historians rarely used abstract nouns. There was hope on another front. Sword not only studied journal articles but also the advice found in the guidelines for writers issued by the journals. They all tended to advocate:  The three C's--clarity, coherence, conciseness Including some short and some long sentences Plain English Precision Active verbs Telling a story There was, however, less consensus on:  Personal pronouns Careful use of jargon Personal voice Creative expression Non-standard structure Engaging titles In another twist, she analyzes the writing itself in the guidelines for writers the journals created. Again, on the one hand we get a mix of creative use of metaphor, humor, word play and other engaging techniques, while on the other hand we find styles of writing that are, yes, academic and stodgy. Conclusion: yes, convention remains a powerful force that shapes most academic writing. But within every discipline there is latitude for and actual published examples of good, interesting, stylish writing.                   22 reviews     July 25, 2021   The negative reviews are an absolute mystery to me. This book offers:1) enlightened and detailed analyses of excellent and bad writing throughout various disciplines2) concrete and original advice and prompts for your own writing3) all of which is based on a study of the writing style in academic journals that the writer herself conducted *plus* on an analysis of the advice given in a number of writing guides. At the same time it's extremely well written, creatively structured, and in itself an example of the same good writing habits that the author pleads for. I have to add, it took me much longer to finish it than I had expected, because it's so dense in input.  If you're thinking about getting a guide for academic writing: get this book instead.     on-writing               6 reviews2 followers     August 1, 2017   I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. As a graduate student in biology, I'm constantly struggling to find my voice in an objectively driven writing world. Sward does a great job at highlighting the how stylish academic writers can still be engaging and educational at the same time. It was actually difficult to get through the book because ideas for my own research writing kept bubbling up. The tips and tricks at the end of each chapter are often simple exercises to help expand your own writing style.I recommend this book to any academic writer —especially those in the hard sciences— looking to add voice, substance, or inspiration to a typically dry writing style.     guide-books-technical               110 reviews15 followers     January 14, 2020   Excellent guidance. Beautifully expressed. Will revisit often!                  88 reviews62 followers     December 24, 2019   The Sword is mightier than the pen. Helen Sword demystifies the rules around academic writing and shares thoughts on how those assumptions have come to be. Sword has a beautiful way of coaching the reader to understand the intention of their writings. The book begins with some digestible research across multiple disciplines. She share some clear metrics to help the academic writer see the trends in their silo. I was moved by her arguments for accessible writing as a way of bringing the academy together.  The chapters flow from academic culture to how writing resources are informed. Sword does an excellent job showcasing the conventions and offers some opportunities to innovate. I was impressed by the spotlights that demonstrate how to assembly of stylish academic writing. A fantastic book with lots of great resources.      leadership               Author  4 books56 followers     August 10, 2022    Helen Sword claims Stylish Academic Writing is “at best an oxymoron and at worst a risky business”. So why should academics accessorise their "research with gratuitous stylistic flourishes?" In Stylish Academic Writing, Sword defends the claim “that elegant ideas deserve elegant expression”. And “intellectual creativity thrives best in an atmosphere of experimentation rather than conformity”. I enjoyed the book, as an academic who long resisted both the “Academese” and “Westernese” that crippled my discipline (politics). These two terms capture how too often, social scientists are expected to use approved Western secular jargon as advertising both their brand and entry into an intellectual club.  This book showcases the work of academic writers from across disciplines who stretch and break disciplinary moulds. Highly recommended for any academic who struggles with writing in an inauthentic voice.      writing-methodology               9 reviews1 follower     December 5, 2019   3.5- some good examples but a lot about rejecting conventional structure that I didn’t necessarily agree with. However, I really liked her examples of how to explain abstract ideas in more concrete ways.     writing               141 reviews32 followers     December 12, 2022   2022 reads: 25Rating: 3.5 stars [Read for the Graduate Research Seminar at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary]     writing-research               34 reviews     July 22, 2019   Wonderfully written with lots of examples and suggestions. Loved the "things to try" at the end of the chapters.                  524 reviews     July 20, 2012   An intriguing blend of research, advice, and cheerleading. Sword is interested in the range of stylistic choices open to academic writers—and why they so seldom take advantage of them. She conducts four kinds of research: (1) a survey of what colleagues see as stylish writing in their fields, (2) an analysis of about 100 books mentioned by them as stylish, (3) an analysis of 1000 typical articles across disciplines, and (4) an analysis of the advice given by authors of style manuals. Oddly, though, this ambitious research program only gets about 1/3 of the pages in her book; the rest is devoted to fairly familiar advice about writing concrete, jargon-free prose. Too bad. But still, a much more interesting book on style than usual. I read it in a single sitting.    writing               69 reviews9 followers     September 29, 2012   This is not really an academic style manual. Rather than presenting a list of "tips" and recommendations, it presents examples of "good" writing by writers from all areas of science. The author, a researcher in higher education, has indeed compiled a huge database of articles from dozens of fields of science and tried to appraise their stylistic canons. The book is structured in short and engaging chapters each dealing with a specific issue (the title, the structure, creativity,...) and followed by a few "exercices" to improve one's style. After finishing this book, writing an academic paper seems more pleasurable as I am tempted to apply all I learnt from this book.                   381 reviews225 followers     June 24, 2012   First, just read it. It is very well written (has to be, right?) and short. Second, I think Sword is trying to free us to explore the gap between our daily persona and our academic self. You know: that self that is naturally vibrant, humorous,and gleeful vs. the academic drone we academics become. She frees us to inject a sense of fun and passion in our prose by providing examples, exercises, and arguments. And, she shows us the technical requirements of good writing. I hope to read this book every six months. Good stuff.                   937 reviews     September 11, 2012   This is one of the best writing guides I've ever read, not only for usefully chronicling the trends of academic writing in several disciplines, but for its useful and pragmatic suggestions (compiled at the end of each chapter) for how to incorporate the author's lessons into writing practices. The suggestions range from the pragmatic to the creative, but all are practical ideas that, if implemented, would greatly contribute to the quality of writing in the academy. Do I think this will happen? Never. Do I hope to try it myself and encourage students to do the same? Absolutely.    2012               165 reviews29 followers     April 24, 2019   Engaging and helpful, filled with examples that illustrate both the suggested techniques and possible pitfalls Sword discusses.                  516 reviews18 followers     January 15, 2022   Academic writing has a reputation for being a bit dry and only interested in the dissemination of abstract information. Concreteness, style, and vivacity often fall to the wayside. As Sword points out, much of this dryness is due to social structures, not deliberate mastery of the craft. This book teaches how to bring a sense of style to academic writing without compromising its informational purposes.By examining 1,000 academic papers in ten different fields, Sword compiles a list of examples of good and bad practices. The style of writing is often dependent on one’s field of study. This style, in turn, is enforced culturally by educators and institutionally by editors of journals. Fortunately, by Sword’s analysis, many journals allow and encourage a lucid style. Why then does such a dry style persist among so many writers? People have been told, over and over again, that “this is just how it is.” Or they have been discouraged from taking risks by one or two people on dissertation or tenure committees. Sword hopes to free us writers from those shadowy shackles by showing little ways to make communication more effective. There’s no inherent rule that academic writing has to be dry, and overly abstract writing is simply ineffective and bad, not helpful. Not every writer will feel freedom to try every suggested tool, but every reader should be able to come away with some new approach to try out. The biggest obstacles cited are fear and anxiety. The ten very different fields examined demonstrate style can be found everywhere – if we only would have the verve to use it. The biggest shortcoming of this book lies in its format. I listened to it as an audiobook and found myself wanting to consult the examples visually. Many tangential pericopes fill the text – usually a good feature – but these were hard to follow audibly. I suspect reading the print version would solve this problem squarely. Obviously, this book seeks to address communicators across many fields who write for academic audiences. Those who write for popular journals or newspapers may find this book of limited use. By using abundant examples, Sword’s study seeks to be relevant to basic sciences like medicine as much as the social sciences or even the humanities. When not used to excess but still not eschewed, style facilitates communication and makes academic studies full of more intrinsic impact. Though immensely important, academic words can lose lingering power by becoming drier than they have to be, but Sword teaches how to resuscitate them back to life.     audiobook education-research writing-communication               415 reviews7 followers     May 2, 2019   A spectre is haunting academia—the spectre of clarity. All the powers of the old Ivory Tower have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Editor and Department Chair, Tenure-Track Professor and Ph.D. Candidate, yadda yadda yadda.  Stylish Academic Writing is a fine book even if far too much of it seems obvious. Funnily enough, the obviousness of Sword's book is precisely her point: academia knows it writes poorly and encourages poor writing, yet it fails to act. Swords offers several explanations for academia's lack of action: stale traditions, stubborn gatekeepers, and myopic individual interests, just to name a few. But as I read it, Sword believes that academia's inability to reflect, self assess, and evolve further exacerbates many of these problems. There are reasons to challenge Sword here. My department, for example, is riddled with self-assessment opportunities. My experience, like anyone's, is limited, but I cannot think of an academic who yearns for more self-assessment opportunities. Plus, disseminating academic writing to large audiences is hard. While sites like Academia.edu allow academics to distribute their work freely, paywalls are a cumbersome obstacle that reinforces certain divisions between scholars and the public, which in turn, might reinforce certain poor-writing practices. Chapter 8, "The Story Net," is easily my favorite chapter in the book. Here, Sword encourages her reader to think of academic work as "a favorite book or movie" and to "distill its plot into a single sentence, and imagine what would happen if you plotted your research story along the same lines" (97). It's interesting to imagine "two seemingly incompatible theoretical concepts...brought into a single conceptual space" as a research project version of Pride and Prejudice (97-98). There is nothing new about pitting two conflicting ideas against one another, but Sword's framing of this process feels new. Plus, it potentially promotes interdisciplinary relationships. Would an economist or sociologist find clarity in thinking of their work as a non-fiction, researched-based appropriation of Pride and Prejudice? Sword seems to think so, and it undoubtedly cuts the other way. There are moments to skip and skim in Stylish Academic Writing, but it's short and worth an afternoon of any academic's time.                   559 reviews8 followers     June 17, 2019   Sword’s advice for writing better academic prose isn’t novel, but it’s sound. As have other writing manuals, she urges scholars to reduce their adverbs, passives, “be” verbs, abstractions, nominalizations, prepositional phrases, and demonstrative pronouns. Her online diagnostic tool, “WritersDiet,” is an amusing way of becoming more aware of one’s own participation in the leaden style authorized by the academy.Sword’s book also provides examples of good scholarly prose, some truly stylish and others at least acceptable, if not rousing. Sword herself writes well enough, though many of her sentences might be tweaked and tightened. For instance, the following paragraph (112) is both clear and amusing: “Every discipline has its own specialized language, its membership rites, its secret handshake. I remember the moment when, as a PhD student in comparative literature, I casually dropped phrase “psychosexual morphology” into a discussion of a Thomas Hardy novel. What power! From the professor’s approving nod and the envious shuffling of my fellow students around the seminar table, I knew that I had just flashed the golden badge that admitted me into an elite disciplinary community. Needless to say, my new party trick fell flat on my nonacademic friends and relations. Whenever I solemnly intoned the word `Foucauldian,’ they quickly went off to find another beer.” (106 words) Still, it could be tightened: “Every discipline has its own specialized language, its secret code. When, as a PhD student in comparative literature, I casually dropped the phrase “psychosexual morphology” into a discussion of a Thomas Hardy novel, the professor’s approving nod and the envious shuffling of fellow students revealed that I had been welcomed into an elite academic community. Needless to say, the same trick did not work with non-academics. Solemnly intoning the word `Foucauldian’ sent them off after another beer.” (77 words) As a historian, I think my real problem with this book is that I don’t want to write stylish academic prose. I want to write like David McCullough and Ron Chernow.
Stylish Academic Writing
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13540208-stylish-academic-writing
https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/40167209-the-sense-of-style-the-thinking-person-s-guide-to-writing-in-the-21st-c
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Zinsser
William Zinsser - Wikipedia
2005-12-20
Authority control
<div><div>
	<p>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>
	</div><div>
<p>For the baseball pitcher and scout, see <a href="/wiki/Bill_Zinser">Bill Zinser</a>.</p>
<p><b>William Knowlton Zinsser</b> (October 7, 1922 – May 12, 2015) was an American writer, editor, <a href="/wiki/Literary_critic">literary critic</a>, and teacher. He began his career as a journalist for the <i><a href="/wiki/New_York_Herald_Tribune">New York Herald Tribune</a></i>, where he worked as a feature writer, drama editor, film critic and editorial writer. He was a longtime contributor to leading magazines.
</p>
<h2>Early life and family[<a href="/w/index.php?title=William_Zinsser&amp;action=edit&amp;section=1">edit</a>]</h2>
<p>Zinsser attended <a href="/wiki/Buckley_Country_Day_School">Buckley Country Day School</a>, <a href="/wiki/Deerfield_Academy">Deerfield Academy</a> and graduated from <a href="/wiki/Princeton_University">Princeton University</a>. He married Carolyn Fraser Zinsser, with whom he had two children, including John Zinsser, a painter. The Zinssers lived in <a href="/wiki/New_York_City">New York City</a> and in <a href="/wiki/Niantic,_Connecticut">Niantic, Connecticut</a>.<sup><a href="#cite_note-nyt-1">[1]</a></sup> One of his cousins married <a href="/wiki/Konrad_Adenauer">Konrad Adenauer</a>; another was the spouse of <a href="/wiki/John_J._McCloy">John J. McCloy</a>;<sup><a href="#cite_note-2">[2]</a></sup> Zinsser wrote, "So it happened that the two men who collaborated most closely on the creation of the new Germany were Zinsser relatives."
</p><p>Zinsser was second cousin of the painter <a href="/wiki/Thomas_S._Buechner">Thomas S. Buechner</a>.<sup><a href="#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup>
</p>
<h2>Professional background[<a href="/w/index.php?title=William_Zinsser&amp;action=edit&amp;section=2">edit</a>]</h2>
<p>Zinsser taught writing at <a href="/wiki/Yale_University">Yale University</a>, where he was the fifth master of <a href="/wiki/Branford_College">Branford College</a> (1973–1979).<sup><a href="#cite_note-4">[4]</a></sup><sup>[<i><a href="/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed">citation needed</a></i>]</sup> He served as executive editor of the <a href="/wiki/Book-of-the-Month_Club">Book-of-the-Month Club</a> from 1979 to 1987.<sup>[<i><a href="/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed">citation needed</a></i>]</sup> He retired from teaching at <a href="/wiki/The_New_School">The New School</a> and the <a href="/wiki/Columbia_University">Columbia University</a> <a href="/wiki/Columbia_University_Graduate_School_of_Journalism">Graduate School of Journalism</a> because of advancing <a href="/wiki/Glaucoma">glaucoma</a>.<sup>[<i><a href="/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed">citation needed</a></i>]</sup>
<sup><a href="#cite_note-5">[5]</a></sup>
</p><p>His 18 books include <i>On Writing Well</i>, which is in the 30th edition; <i>Writing to Learn</i>; <i>Writing with a Word Processor</i>; <i>Mitchell &amp; Ruff</i> (originally published as <i>Willie and Dwike</i>); <i>Spring Training</i>; <i>American Places</i>; <i>Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs</i>; <i>Writing About Your Life</i>; and most recently, <i>Writing Places</i>, an autobiography. <i>The American Scholar</i> ran William Zinsser's weekly web posting, "Zinsser on Friday," featuring his short essays on writing, the arts, and popular culture.<sup><a href="#cite_note-6">[6]</a></sup>
</p><p>In his books, Zinsser emphasizes the word "economy". Author <a href="/wiki/James_J._Kilpatrick">James J. Kilpatrick</a>, in his book <i>The Writer's Art</i>, says that if he were limited to just one book on how to write, it would be William Zinsser's <i>On Writing Well</i>. He adds, "Zinsser's sound theory is that 'writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it."<sup><a href="#cite_note-7">[7]</a></sup><sup><a href="#cite_note-8">[8]</a></sup>
</p><p>Zinsser encouraged memoir writers to believe in their own uniqueness and defined success as "doing what you want to do and doing it well".<sup><a href="#cite_note-9">[9]</a></sup>
</p><p>Zinsser interviewed <a href="/wiki/Woody_Allen">Woody Allen</a> in 1963 for the <i><a href="/wiki/Saturday_Evening_Post">Saturday Evening Post</a></i>. After a chance encounter in 1980, Allen cast Zinsser, a <a href="/wiki/Protestant">Protestant</a>, in a small role as a <a href="/wiki/Catholic">Catholic</a> priest in his film <i><a href="/wiki/Stardust_Memories">Stardust Memories</a></i>.<sup><a href="#cite_note-10">[10]</a></sup>
</p>
<h2>Death[<a href="/w/index.php?title=William_Zinsser&amp;action=edit&amp;section=3">edit</a>]</h2>
<p>Zinsser died at the age of 92 in Manhattan on May 12, 2015.<sup><a href="#cite_note-nyt-1">[1]</a></sup>
</p>
<h2>References[<a href="/w/index.php?title=William_Zinsser&amp;action=edit&amp;section=4">edit</a>]</h2>
<div><ol>
<li>^ <a href="#cite_ref-nyt_1-0"><sup><i><b>a</b></i></sup></a> <a href="#cite_ref-nyt_1-1"><sup><i><b>b</b></i></sup></a> <cite>Martin, Douglas (May 12, 2015). <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/william-zinsser-author-of-on-writing-well-dies-at-92.html">"William Zinsser, Author of 'On Writing Well,' Dies at 92"</a>. <i>The New York Times</i>. Retrieved May 13, 2015.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-2">^</a></b> <cite><a href="https://theamericanscholar.org/a-cousin-from-cologne/">"A Cousin from Cologne"</a>. <i>The American Scholar</i>. March 25, 2011.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-3">^</a></b> <cite>Zinsser, William. <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/two-men-and-a-portrait-151215221/">"Two Men and a Portrait"</a>. <i>Smithsonian Magazine</i>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-4">^</a></b> <cite><a href="http://english.yale.edu/news/department-news/remembering-william-zinsser-1922-2015">"Remembering William Zinsser (1922 - 2015) | English"</a>. <i>english.yale.edu</i>. Retrieved October 27, 2016.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-5">^</a></b> <cite>Barry, Dan (April 28, 2013). <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/books/william-zinsser-author-of-on-writing-well-at-his-work.html?pagewanted=all">"A Writing Coach Becomes a Listener – Dan Barry"</a>. <i>The New York Times</i>. Retrieved July 11, 2013.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-6">^</a></b> <cite><a href="http://www.theamericanscholar.org/zinsser/">"The Complete Zinsser on Friday – William Zinsser"</a>. The American Scholar. February 2, 2012. Retrieved March 1, 2013.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-7">^</a></b> <cite>Zinsser, William (2006). <a href="https://archive.org/details/onwritingwellcla00zins_4/page/12"><i>On Writing Well</i></a>. New York: Harper Collins. p. <a href="https://archive.org/details/onwritingwellcla00zins_4/page/12">12</a>. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-06-089154-1"><bdi>978-0-06-089154-1</bdi></a>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-8">^</a></b> <cite>Kilpatrick, James Jackson (1984). "chapter 6 "The Tools We Live By"". <i>The Writer's Art</i>. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-4494-0561-8"><bdi>978-1-4494-0561-8</bdi></a>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-9">^</a></b> <cite><a href="http://www.embracepossibility.com/blog/william-zinsser-modeling-success-series/">"William Zinsser - Modeling Success Series - #2 | Embrace Possibility Blog"</a>. <i>www.embracepossibility.com</i>. Retrieved February 5, 2017.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-10">^</a></b> <cite>Zinsser, William (August 2, 2010). <a href="http://theamericanscholar.org/my-stardust-memories/">"My Stardust Memories"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/The_American_Scholar">The American Scholar</a></i>. Retrieved April 19, 2012.</cite>
</li>
</ol></div>
<h2>Further reading[<a href="/w/index.php?title=William_Zinsser&amp;action=edit&amp;section=5">edit</a>]</h2>
<ul><li><i>Contemporary Authors Online.</i> The Gale Group, 2006. PEN (Permanent Entry Number): 0000023043</li></ul>
<h2>External links[<a href="/w/index.php?title=William_Zinsser&amp;action=edit&amp;section=6">edit</a>]</h2>
<ul><li><a href="http://www.williamzinsserwriter.com/">Official website</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5010744/">William Zinsser</a> at <a href="/wiki/IMDb">IMDb</a></li>
<li><a href="http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/zinsser.html">NYU's Fales Library Guide to the William Zinsser Papers</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.embracepossibility.com/blog/william-zinsser-modeling-success-series/">Interview with William Zinsser (with original audio) - Modeling Success Series - Embrace Possibility</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.embracepossibility.com/blog/william-zinsser-wesleyan-commencement-speech/">Wesleyan Commencement Speech Transcript</a> - Embrace Possibility Blog</li></ul>
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 William Zinsser

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 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 For the baseball pitcher and scout, see Bill Zinser.

 William Knowlton Zinsser (October 7, 1922 – May 12, 2015) was an American writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher. He began his career as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked as a feature writer, drama editor, film critic and editorial writer. He was a longtime contributor to leading magazines.

 Early life and family [ edit ]

 Zinsser attended Buckley Country Day School, Deerfield Academy and graduated from Princeton University. He married Carolyn Fraser Zinsser, with whom he had two children, including John Zinsser, a painter. The Zinssers lived in New York City and in Niantic, Connecticut.[1] One of his cousins married Konrad Adenauer; another was the spouse of John J. McCloy;[2] Zinsser wrote, "So it happened that the two men who collaborated most closely on the creation of the new Germany were Zinsser relatives."

 Zinsser was second cousin of the painter Thomas S. Buechner.[3]

 Professional background [ edit ]

 Zinsser taught writing at Yale University, where he was the fifth master of Branford College (1973–1979).[4][ citation needed ] He served as executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club from 1979 to 1987.[ citation needed ] He retired from teaching at The New School and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism because of advancing glaucoma.[ citation needed ] [5]

 His 18 books include On Writing Well, which is in the 30th edition; Writing to Learn; Writing with a Word Processor; Mitchell & Ruff (originally published as Willie and Dwike); Spring Training; American Places; Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs; Writing About Your Life; and most recently, Writing Places, an autobiography. The American Scholar ran William Zinsser's weekly web posting, "Zinsser on Friday," featuring his short essays on writing, the arts, and popular culture.[6]

 In his books, Zinsser emphasizes the word "economy". Author James J. Kilpatrick, in his book The Writer's Art, says that if he were limited to just one book on how to write, it would be William Zinsser's On Writing Well. He adds, "Zinsser's sound theory is that 'writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it."[7][8]

 Zinsser encouraged memoir writers to believe in their own uniqueness and defined success as "doing what you want to do and doing it well".[9]

 Zinsser interviewed Woody Allen in 1963 for the Saturday Evening Post. After a chance encounter in 1980, Allen cast Zinsser, a Protestant, in a small role as a Catholic priest in his film Stardust Memories.[10]

 Death [ edit ]

 Zinsser died at the age of 92 in Manhattan on May 12, 2015.[1]

 References [ edit ]

 1. ^ a b Martin, Douglas (May 12, 2015). "William Zinsser, Author of 'On Writing Well,' Dies at 92". The New York Times . Retrieved May 13, 2015 .
 2. ^ "A Cousin from Cologne". The American Scholar. March 25, 2011.
 3. ^ Zinsser, William. "Two Men and a Portrait". Smithsonian Magazine.
 4. ^ "Remembering William Zinsser (1922 - 2015) | English". english.yale.edu . Retrieved October 27, 2016 .
 5. ^ Barry, Dan (April 28, 2013). "A Writing Coach Becomes a Listener – Dan Barry". The New York Times . Retrieved July 11, 2013 .
 6. ^ "The Complete Zinsser on Friday – William Zinsser". The American Scholar. February 2, 2012 . Retrieved March 1, 2013 .
 7. ^ Zinsser, William (2006). On Writing Well. New York: Harper Collins. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-06-089154-1.
 8. ^ Kilpatrick, James Jackson (1984). "chapter 6 "The Tools We Live By"". The Writer's Art. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4494-0561-8.
 9. ^ "William Zinsser - Modeling Success Series - #2 | Embrace Possibility Blog". www.embracepossibility.com . Retrieved February 5, 2017 .
 10. ^ Zinsser, William (August 2, 2010). "My Stardust Memories". The American Scholar . Retrieved April 19, 2012 .

 Further reading [ edit ]

 * Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2006. PEN (Permanent Entry Number): 0000023043

 External links [ edit ]

 Wikiquote has quotations related to William Zinsser.
 * Official website
 * William Zinsser at IMDb
 * NYU's Fales Library Guide to the William Zinsser Papers
 * Interview with William Zinsser (with original audio) - Modeling Success Series - Embrace Possibility
 * Wesleyan Commencement Speech Transcript - Embrace Possibility Blog
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
	 
For the baseball pitcher and scout, see Bill Zinser.
 William Knowlton Zinsser (October 7, 1922 – May 12, 2015) was an American writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher. He began his career as a journalist for the  New York Herald Tribune , where he worked as a feature writer, drama editor, film critic and editorial writer. He was a longtime contributor to leading magazines.
Early life and family[edit]
Zinsser attended Buckley Country Day School, Deerfield Academy and graduated from Princeton University. He married Carolyn Fraser Zinsser, with whom he had two children, including John Zinsser, a painter. The Zinssers lived in New York City and in Niantic, Connecticut. [1]  One of his cousins married Konrad Adenauer; another was the spouse of John J. McCloy; [2]  Zinsser wrote, "So it happened that the two men who collaborated most closely on the creation of the new Germany were Zinsser relatives."
 Zinsser was second cousin of the painter Thomas S. Buechner. [3] 
Professional background[edit]
Zinsser taught writing at Yale University, where he was the fifth master of Branford College (1973–1979). [4]  [ citation needed ] He served as executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club from 1979 to 1987.[ citation needed ] He retired from teaching at The New School and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism because of advancing glaucoma.[ citation needed ]
 [5] 
 His 18 books include On Writing Well, which is in the 30th edition; Writing to Learn; Writing with a Word Processor; Mitchell &amp; Ruff (originally published as Willie and Dwike); Spring Training; American Places; Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs; Writing About Your Life; and most recently, Writing Places, an autobiography. The American Scholar ran William Zinsser's weekly web posting, "Zinsser on Friday," featuring his short essays on writing, the arts, and popular culture. [6] 
 In his books, Zinsser emphasizes the word "economy". Author James J. Kilpatrick, in his book The Writer's Art, says that if he were limited to just one book on how to write, it would be William Zinsser's On Writing Well. He adds, "Zinsser's sound theory is that 'writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it." [7]   [8] 
 Zinsser encouraged memoir writers to believe in their own uniqueness and defined success as "doing what you want to do and doing it well". [9] 
 Zinsser interviewed Woody Allen in 1963 for the  Saturday Evening Post . After a chance encounter in 1980, Allen cast Zinsser, a Protestant, in a small role as a Catholic priest in his film  Stardust Memories . [10] 
Death[edit]
Zinsser died at the age of 92 in Manhattan on May 12, 2015. [1] 
References[edit]
 
^    a       b    Martin, Douglas (May 12, 2015). "William Zinsser, Author of 'On Writing Well,' Dies at 92". The New York Times. Retrieved May 13, 2015.
  ^   "A Cousin from Cologne". The American Scholar. March 25, 2011.
  ^  Zinsser, William. "Two Men and a Portrait". Smithsonian Magazine.
  ^   "Remembering William Zinsser (1922 - 2015) | English". english.yale.edu. Retrieved October 27, 2016.
  ^  Barry, Dan (April 28, 2013). "A Writing Coach Becomes a Listener – Dan Barry". The New York Times. Retrieved July 11, 2013.
  ^   "The Complete Zinsser on Friday – William Zinsser". The American Scholar. February 2, 2012. Retrieved March 1, 2013.
  ^  Zinsser, William (2006).  On Writing Well . New York: Harper Collins. p. 12. ISBN  978-0-06-089154-1 .
  ^  Kilpatrick, James Jackson (1984). "chapter 6 "The Tools We Live By"". The Writer's Art. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing. ISBN  978-1-4494-0561-8 .
  ^   "William Zinsser - Modeling Success Series - #2 | Embrace Possibility Blog". www.embracepossibility.com. Retrieved February 5, 2017.
  ^  Zinsser, William (August 2, 2010). "My Stardust Memories".  The American Scholar . Retrieved April 19, 2012.
 
Further reading[edit]
  Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2006. PEN (Permanent Entry Number): 0000023043 
External links[edit]
  Official website 
 William Zinsser at IMDb 
 NYU's Fales Library Guide to the William Zinsser Papers 
 Interview with William Zinsser (with original audio) - Modeling Success Series - Embrace Possibility 
 Wesleyan Commencement Speech Transcript - Embrace Possibility Blog
William Zinsser - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Zinsser
https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1950s/
A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1950s
2018-10-22
None
<div><div>
	 
	<p><p>Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time.</p>
<p>In the moment, you often can’t tell which books are which. <em>The Great Gatsby </em>wasn’t a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses; the canon looms and obscures. Still, over the next weeks, we’ll be publishing a list a day, each one attempting to define a discrete decade, <a href="https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1900s/">starting with the 1900s</a> (as you’ve no doubt guessed by now) and counting down until we get to the (nearly complete) 2010s.</p>
<p>Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade—a global lens would require a much longer list. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there’s no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. I’ve simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade—both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I’ve limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored <em>Dubliners</em> in the 1910s so I could include <em>Ulysses </em>in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I’ll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons.</p>
<p>For our sixth installment, below you’ll find 10 books that defined the 1950s. (Head here for the <a href="https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1910s/">1910s</a>, <a href="https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1920s/">20s</a>, <a href="https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1930s/">30s</a>, and <a href="https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1940s/">40s</a>).</p>
<p><strong>J. D. Salinger, <em>The Catcher in the Rye</em> (1951)</strong></p>
<p>Whether you consider Holden an <a href="https://lithub.com/holden-caulfield-egotistical-whiner-or-melancholy-boy-genius/">egotistical whiner or a melancholy boy genius</a>, and even if you <a href="https://lithub.com/the-100-best-one-star-reviews-of-the-catcher-in-the-rye/">really, <em>really </em>hate it</a>, there’s no denying that this novel, which has sold more than 65 million copies since its publication (though this number is a few years old and certainly soft), and continues to sell at a healthy clip, was a crucial cultural touchstone in America in the 1950s.  David Shields and Shane Salerno go further in the introduction to their biography <em>Salinger</em>, writing that the book “redefined postwar America and can best be understood as a disguised war novel.”</p>
<p>Salinger emerged from the war incapable of believing in the heroic, noble ideals we like to think our cultural institutions uphold. Instead of producing a combat novel, as Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Joseph Heller did, Salinger took the trauma of war and embedded it within what looked to the naked eye like a coming-of-age novel.</p>
<p>It may have even influenced the way we think about teenagers to this day. “It absolutely speaks to that moment the teenager emerges as a recognizable social group,” Salinger scholar Sarah Graham told the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8084931.stm">BBC</a>. “Before that people went through their teenage years with no sense it was a particular kind of identity. It is the first novel of the modern teenage years.” Indeed, it was only after WWII that a distinctive youth culture began to emerge: in part because more teenagers were in high school and fewer were working to support their families. They had time on their hands and angst in their hearts. “Leisure gave teenagers time to reflect on where they were going,” Dr. Graham said. “The idea of existential angst in some way draws from <em>Catcher in the Rye</em> as much as the novel reflects it. There is a strong dialogue between the book and the teenage experience—they are mutually shaping.” As Adam Golub has <a href="https://www.forbes.com/2010/01/30/j-d-salinger-catcher-in-the-rye-pop-culture-opinions-contributors-adam-golub.html#37615722537d">pointed out</a>, Holden was the first teenager Americans really knew who refused to grow up, and was celebrated for it. This of course despite the fact that Salinger did not at all write the book for teenagers, and that it was well received—called “brilliant” by <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/13/specials/salinger-rye02.html">reviewer</a> after <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1951/08/11/the-vision-of-the-innocent">reviewer</a>—as a novel for adults.</p>
<p>Famously, the contemporary hype around <em>Catcher </em>was so great that it forced Salinger into the reclusiveness he’s now known for—he was looking, primarily, for privacy, and didn’t mind perpetuating a myth around himself in the process.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Ellison, <em>Invisible Man</em> (1952)</strong></p>
<p>“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” Ellison writes in the opening lines of this much-read, much-assigned, and highly influential novel. (So influential that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/obama-melville-and-the-tea-party.html">President Obama modeled </a><em>Dreams of My Father </em>on it.) The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 1953. In his acceptance speech, Ellison said: “If I were asked in all seriousness just what I considered to be the chief significance of <em>Invisible Man</em> as a fiction, I would reply: Its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.”</p>
<p>When I examined the rather rigid concepts of reality which informed a number of the works which impressed me and to which I owed a great deal, I was forced to conclude that for me and for so many hundreds of thousands of Americans, reality was simply far more mysterious and uncertain, and at the same time more exciting, and still, despite its raw violence and capriciousness, more promising.</p>
<p>To see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many triumphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction. I was to dream of a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity, and individual self-realization. A prose which would make use of the richness of our speech, the idiomatic expression, and the rhetorical flourishes from past periods which are still alive among us. Despite my personal failures there must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.</p>
<p>The novel manages to be many things at once; this is one of its many strengths. “Evenhandedly exposing the hypocrisies and stereotypes of all comers,” Lev Grossman wrote in <a href="http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/invisible-man-1952-by-ralph-ellison/"><em>TIME</em></a>, “<em>Invisible Man</em> is far more than a race novel, or even a bildungsroman. It’s the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century.”</p>
<p><strong>Ray Bradbury, <em>Fahrenheit 451</em> (1953)</strong></p>
<p><em>Fahrenheit 451 </em>is one of those books we all think we understand—probably because we’ve all had to “analyze” it in high school—but even its author wavered on the point. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury explained it in the context of government censorship:</p>
<p>I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.</p>
<p>When asked in 2005 what inspired the book burning in the novel, <a href="https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Reader-Resources-Fahrenheit451.pdf">Bradbury had a pithier response</a>: “Well, Hitler of course.”</p>
<p>When I was fifteen, he burnt the books in the streets of Berlin. Then along the way I learned about the libraries in Alexandria burning five thousand years ago. That grieved my soul. Since I’m self-educated, that means my educators—the libraries—are in danger. And if it could happen in Alexandria, if it could happen in Berlin, maybe it could happen somewhere up ahead, and my heroes would be killed.</p>
<p>He also spoke against McCarthyism in his lifetime, and the novel has frequently been interpreted of a criticism of the same, but in later life <a href="https://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125">Bradbury denied this</a> and claimed that it was “a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature,” despite the fact that television was relatively new at the time, just becoming popular. Whatever it means, it remains an enduring classic.</p>
<p><strong>J. R. R. Tolkien, <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> (1954)</strong></p>
<p>Initial reviews were mixed when the first volume of Tolkien’s fantasy epic was first published, but the ones that knew, really knew. None other than W. H. Auden reviewed the book in the <em><a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/specials/tolkien-fellowship.html?smid=tw-nytbooks&amp;smtyp=cur">Times</a></em>, praising Tolkien’s <em>The Hobbit </em>as “one of the best children’s stories of this century” and writing of his new volume for adults:</p>
<p>On the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> is at least as good as <em>The Thirty-Nine Steps</em>. . . . [But] if one is to take a tale of this kind seriously, one must feel that, however superficially unlike the world we live in its characters and events may be, it nevertheless holds up the mirror to the only nature we know, our own; in this, too, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded superbly, and what happened in the year of the Shire 1418 in the Third Age of Middle Earth is not only fascinating in A. D. 1954 but also a warning and an inspiration. No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy than <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>.</p>
<p>With the second two books (Tolkien originally meant the three books of <em>The Lord of the Rings </em>to be published as a single volume) it steadily gained readership, exploding in popularity particularly in the 1960s with the publication of the paperbacks, and has become one of the best-selling literary works of all time. It is also generally agreed to be the best literary epic ever written, and has had untold influence on the genre ever since its publication. Tolkien’s worlds have been re-immortalized in the songs of <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ramble-on-rockers-who-love-the-lord-of-the-rings-100787/">Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Rush, etc.</a>, and more recently drawn out into increasingly unnecessary films <em>(The Hobbit</em>, I’m looking at you)<em>.</em> Less widely known were <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAAp_luluo0">J. R. R. Tolkien’s rap battle skills</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Vladimir Nabokov, <em>Lolita</em> (1955)</strong></p>
<p>Nabokov’s most famous novel was originally published in Paris (in English) in 1955 by a publisher whose <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/121908/lolita-cultural-icon">other titles included</a> <em>Until She Screams</em>, <em>Tender Thighs</em>, and <em>There’s a Whip in My Valise</em>, and generally ignored until Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year. Then it was roundly disparaged and dismissed as trash, and banned by the French government—no wonder that smuggled-in copies were already being sold for $20 a pop when it was finally published in the US by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, kicking off what Nabokov called in his journal “Hurricane <em>Lolita</em>.” As <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/hurricane-lolita">Steve King writes</a>:</p>
<p>Within four days of publication in the U.S. the book was into a third printing; by September 13th it had become the first book since <em>Gone with the Wind</em> to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks; by the end of September, it was #1 on the bestseller lists. By the time Nabokov appeared on the cover of <em>Newsweek </em>in 1962, it seemed that the only one who hadn’t read the book was Groucho Marx, who quipped, “I plan to put off reading Lolita for six years, until she’s eighteen.”</p>
<p>Since then, of course, the novel—along with its eponymous character—has become iconic, though more contemporary readers understand the way the image of Humbert’s nymphet has been twisted as the years have worn on. “With the possible exception of Gatsby, no twentieth-century American literary character penetrated the public consciousness quite like Lolita,” Ira Wells noted in <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/121908/lolita-cultural-icon"><em>The New Republic</em></a>.</p>
<p>Her very name entered the language as a common noun: “a precociously seductive girl,” <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lolita">according to</a> the <em>Merriam-Webster </em>dictionary. (Gatsby, by contrast, had to settle for a mere adjective: “Gatsbyesque.”) . . . [But] we have forgotten Lolita. At least, we’ve forgotten about the young girl, “standing four feet ten in one sock,” whose childhood deprivation and brutalization and torture subliminally animate the myth that launched a thousand music videos. The publication, reception, and cultural re-fashioning of <em>Lolita</em> over the past 60 years is the story of how a twelve-year-old rape victim named Dolores became a dominant archetype for seductive female sexuality in contemporary America: It is the story of how a girl became a noun.</p>
<p>But the fact that we’re still talking about, going over the contents and the form and the way its been misunderstood and the way we failed Nabokov and the way Nabokov failed us is only proof of the novel’s significance. It is certainly a book about rape, though it does not invite us to accept rape. It is certainly a book about erotic obsession, though we are meant to pity the obsessed. It is certainly an enduring literary masterpiece.</p>
<p><strong>James Baldwin, <em>Notes of a Native Son</em> (1955)</strong></p>
<p>All three of Baldwin’s most famous works—<em>Go Tell It On the Mountain</em>, <em>Notes of a Native Son</em>, and <em>Giovanni’s Room</em>—were published in the 50s, the decade that he established himself as an essential intellectual, social, literary, and moral voice in this country. All of these were defining books of the decade, but I’ve chosen to highlight the essay collection above either of the two novels because of Baldwin’s importance as an activist and social critic. That is, with these ten essays, as well as much of his other writing and speaking, he helped haul America into the second half of the twentieth century. We’re not quite there yet, but much of the ground we’ve gained is due to Baldwin. He also influenced a whole generation of American writers. “Speeches will be given, essays written and hefty books will be published on the various lives of James Baldwin,” Maya Angelou wrote after his death.</p>
<p>Some fantasies will be broadcast and even some truths will be told. Someone will speak of the essayist James Baldwin in his role as the biblical prophet Isaiah admonishing his country to repent from wickedness and create within itself a clean spirit and a clean heart. Others will examine Baldwin the playwright and novelist who burned with a righteous indignation over the paucity of kindness, the absence of love and the crippling hypocrisy he saw in the streets of the United States and sensed in the hearts of his fellow citizens. I will speak of James Baldwin, my friend and brother. . . . [who] set the stage for me to write <em>I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings</em>, encouraged me to take a course in cinematography in Sweden and told me that I was intelligent and very brave.</p>
<p><strong>Ayn Rand, <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> (1957)</strong></p>
<p>I can’t tell you how much it pains me that Ayn Rand is the only woman on this list. I would love to have replaced her (and/or some of the others here, cough, Kerouac, cough) with Hannah Arendt, or Flannery O’Connor, or Patricia Highsmith, or Barbara Pym. But there’s no denying the influence of <em>Atlas Shrugged </em>on America—horrible and damaging and Paul Ryan-producing as it may be. <em>Atlas Shrugged </em>is Rand’s treatise on Objectivism (read: “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”), her love letter to capitalism, her libertarian rant, and her magnum opus. It was a bestseller in the week of its release and for 22 weeks in total, and <a href="https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2009/02/26/atlas-felt-a-sense-of-deja-vu">sales rose again</a> after the 2007 financial crisis. It has remained popular among high school students and conservatives (an apparently odd paring, though I can think of a few other qualities that unite them), the former likely in part because the Ayn Rand institute <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15atlas.html?_r=3&amp;oref=slogin&amp;pagewanted=print">donates</a> 400,000 copies of her novels to high schools every year.</p>
<p>“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” bank executive John A. Allison told <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15atlas.html?_r=3&amp;oref=slogin&amp;pagewanted=print"><em>The New York Times</em></a>. “It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete.”</p>
<p>Since its publication it has spurred many, many slobbering tributes that include <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2018/04/23/what-ayn-rands-atlas-shrugged-teaches-us-about-the-insufficiency-of-good-intentions/#4dd8726378fe">lines like</a> “<em>Atlas Shrugged</em> has shaped the worldview of many devotees of liberty,” and again, given us Paul Ryan—not to mention Alan Greenspan, who <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/mar/27/ayn-rand-atlas-shrugged">didn’t exactly prevent the recession</a> that readers ran to his idol Ayn Rand to assuage.</p>
<p><strong>Jack Kerouac, <em>On the Road</em> (1957)</strong></p>
<p>“That’s not writing; that’s typing,” said Truman Capote. “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s,”<em> </em><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/05/fiction.jackkerouac">said Bob Dylan</a>. Whatever you may think of it (and I think it has . . . not held up well), <em>On the Road</em> is without a doubt the most important book, indeed the defining text, of the much-mythologized American “Beat Generation.” It’s not only in retrospect, either—we knew this as soon as the novel was published. “<em>On the Road </em><a href="http://graphics.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/kerouac-millstein.pdf"> </a>is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as “beat,” and whose principal avatar he is,” wrote Gilbert Millstein in his 1957 <em>New York Times </em>review, flying in the face of much critical response at the time. “Just as, more than any other <a href="https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1920s/">novel of the Twenties</a>, <em>The Sun Also Rises </em>came to be regarded as the testament of the “Lost Generation,” so it seems certain that <em>On the Road </em>will come to be known as that of the “Beat Generation.” He was correct. “After 1957 <em>On The Road</em> sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road,” William S. Burroughs once remarked.</p>
<p>This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.</p>
<p><strong>Leon Uris, <em>Exodus</em> (1958)</strong></p>
<p>Upon its publication, this novel, a massive chronicle of the founding of the State of Israel, instantly became a huge international phenomenon. The hardcover was on the <em>New York Times</em> bestseller list for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/25/arts/leon-uris-78-dies-wrote-sweeping-novels-like-exodus.html">over a year</a>, with a cool 19 weeks in the top spot. The paperback was “the fastest-selling work every published by Bantam,” according to Ira B. Nadel’s <em>Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller</em>, and by 1965 was among the top 10 bestsellers of all time. The popularity of the novel, and of the 1960 film adaptation, shaped American perception of Israel, immediately after its publication and beyond. As Uris <a href="https://israelforever.org/israel/reading/exodus/">himself said</a>: “My greatest accomplishment is <em>Exodus</em>. It changed peoples lives, it changed the conception of the Jewish people in the international scene.” For his part, David Ben-Gurion, <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/the-exodus-effect-of-leon-uris-on-u-s-jewry-1.5197397">Israel’s first Prime Minister, said</a>: “As a literary work, it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.”</p>
<p>The novel, Bradley Burston wrote in <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/the-exodus-effect-of-leon-uris-on-u-s-jewry-1.5197397"><em>Haaretz</em></a>, “transformed American Jews as no other work has done, before or since . . . it was savaged by critics and academics, and resoundingly ignored by literary prize committees. When the book appeared in 1958, however, it sold in the millions. It was said that it was nearly as common to find a copy of <em>Exodus</em> in American-Jewish households as to find the Bible—and, of the two, not a few Jewish households apparently had only <em>Exodus</em>.”</p>
<p>Needless to say, this American sympathy for Israel and the American Jewish community changed the face of the country and has had lasting effects—both positive and negative, particularly, in the latter case, due to its gross demonization of Arabs. Also, not for nothing, but many Americans could use the reminder that this novel is a work of fiction.</p>
<p><strong>Chinua Achebe, <em>Things Fall Apart</em> (1958)</strong></p>
<p>“The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all genius, escapes precise analysis,” Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote in the <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/22/the-achievement-of-chinua-achebe/">introduction</a> to a Penguin Classics edition of the text.</p>
<p>If we could explain it fully, we could reproduce it, and it is of the nature of genius to be irreproducible. Still, there has been no shortage of attempts to explain his literary achievement, an achievement that starts with the fact that <em>Things Fall Apart </em>(1958), the first of the novels in his “African trilogy” defined a starting point for the modern African novel. There are, as critics are quick to point out, earlier examples of extended narrative written in and about Africa by African writers. Some of them—Amos Tutuola’s <em>Palm-Wine Drinkard </em>(1952), Cyprian Ekwensi’s <em>People of the City </em>(1954), to name but two also written by Nigerians—remain eminently worth reading. But place them beside the work of Achebe and you will see that in his writing something magnificent and new was going on.</p>
<p>One reason for this, which often passes without notice, is that Achebe solved a problem that these earlier novels did not. He found a way to represent for a global Anglophone audience the diction of his Igbo homeland, allowing readers of English elsewhere to experience a particular relationship to language and the world in a way that made it seem quite natural—transparent, one might almost say. Achebe enables us to hear the voices of Igboland in a new use of our own language. A measure of his achievement is that Achebe found an African voice in English that is so natural its artifice eludes us.</p>
<p>Achebe introduced African literature to the rest of the world—and opened the door for a whole host of African writers in the UK and America, both by his success and as an editor of the African Writers Series, published by Heinemann. His first novel has sold over 20 million copies and been translated into 57 languages, and has been taught ever since its publication as a text essential for understanding decolonization and mid-century Africa.</p>
<p><strong>See also:</strong></p>
<p>Isaac Asimov, <em>I, Robot</em> (1950), Ray Bradbury, <em>The Martian Chronicles</em> (1950), Patricia Highsmith, <em>Strangers on a Train</em> (1950), C. S. Lewis, <em>The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe</em> (1950), Hermann Hesse, <em>Siddhartha</em> (first English translation, 1951), Hannah Arendt, <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism</em> (1951), Vladimir Nabokov, <em>Speak, Memory</em> (1951), Josephine Tey, <em>The Daughter of Time</em> (1951), Isaac Asimov, the <em>Foundation </em>Trilogy (1951-1953), Ernest Hemingway, <em>The Old Man and the Sea</em> (1952), Anne Frank, <em>The Diary of a Young Girl</em> (first English translation, 1952), Patricia Highsmith, <em>The Price of Salt</em> (1952), Bernard Malamud, <em>The Natural</em> (1952), Flannery O’Connor, <em>Wise Blood</em> (1952), Barbara Pym, <em>Excellent Women</em> (1952), John Steinbeck, <em>East of Eden</em> (1952), Kurt Vonnegut, <em>Piano Player</em> (1952), E. B. White, <em>Charlotte’s Web</em> (1952), Raymond Chandler, <em>The Long Goodbye</em> (1953), James Baldwin, <em>Go Tell it on the Mountain</em> (1953), Alfred Kinsey, <i>Sexual Behavior in the Human Female </i>(1953), Ian Fleming, <em>Casino Royale</em> (1953), Samuel Beckett, <em>Waiting for Godot</em> (1953), Gwendolyn Brooks, <em>Maud Martha</em> (1953), William S. Burroughs, <em>Junky</em> (1953), Arthur Miller, <em>The Crucible</em> (1953), J. D. Salinger, <em>Nine Stories</em> (1953), Kingsley Amis, <em>Lucky Jim</em> (1954), William Golding, <em>Lord of the Flies</em> (1954), Wallace Stevens, <i>Collected Poems </i>(1954), Richard Matheson, <em>I Am Legend</em> (1954), Patricia Highsmith, <em>The Talented Mr. Ripley</em> (1955), J. P. Donleavy, <em>The Ginger Man</em> (1955), Graham Greene, <em>The Quiet American</em> (1955), <em>The Guinness Book of Records</em> (1955), Françoise Sagan, <em>Bonjour Tristesse</em> (first English translation 1955), Flannery O’Connor, <em>A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories</em> (1955), John Ashbery, <em>Some Trees</em> (1956), Gerald Durrell, <em>My Family and Other Animals</em> (1956), Dodie Smith, <em>The Hundred and One Dalmatians</em> (1956), James Baldwin, <em>Giovanni’s Room</em> (1956), Allen Ginsberg, <em>Howl and Other Poems</em> (1956), John Cheever, <em>The Wapshot Chronicle</em> (1957), Roland Barthes, <i>Mythologies </i>(1957), Dr. Seuss, <em>The Cat in the Hat </em>(1957), Martin Luther King, Jr., <em>Stride Towards Freedom</em> (1957), Bernard Malamud, <em>The Assistant</em> (1957), Nevil Shute, <em>On the Beach</em> (1957), Vladimir Nabokov, <em>Pnin</em> (1957), Boris Pasternak, <i>Doctor Zhivago </i>(first English translation 1958), Truman Capote, <em>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</em> (1958), Graham Greene, <em>Our Man in Havana</em> (1958), Jack Kerouac, <em>The Dharma Bums</em> (1958), Yukio Mishima, <em>Confessions of a Mask</em> (first English translation, 1958), Americo Paredes, <em>With His Pistol in His Hand</em> (1958), T. H. White, <em>The Once and Future King</em> (1958), Robert Bloch, <em>Psycho</em> (1959), Günter Grass, <em>The Tin Drum</em> (1959), Philip Roth, <em>Goodbye, Columbus</em> (1959), Lorraine Hansberry, <em>A Raisin in the Sun</em> (1959), William S. Burroughs, <em>Naked Lunch</em> (1959), Shirley Jackson, <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> (1959), John Knowles, <em>A Separate Peace</em> (1959), Strunk &amp; White, <em>The Elements of Style</em> (1959), D. H. Lawrence, <em>Lady Chatterley’s Lover</em> (unexpurgated U.S. version released 1959)</p>
</p>
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 A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1950s

 We Have Reached the Halfway Mark of This Series

 By Emily Temple
 October 22, 2018

 Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time.

 In the moment, you often can’t tell which books are which. The Great Gatsby wasn’t a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses; the canon looms and obscures. Still, over the next weeks, we’ll be publishing a list a day, each one attempting to define a discrete decade, starting with the 1900s (as you’ve no doubt guessed by now) and counting down until we get to the (nearly complete) 2010s.

 Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade—a global lens would require a much longer list. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there’s no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. I’ve simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade—both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I’ve limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners in the 1910s so I could include Ulysses in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I’ll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons.

 For our sixth installment, below you’ll find 10 books that defined the 1950s. (Head here for the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s).

 J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

 Whether you consider Holden an egotistical whiner or a melancholy boy genius, and even if you really, really hate it, there’s no denying that this novel, which has sold more than 65 million copies since its publication (though this number is a few years old and certainly soft), and continues to sell at a healthy clip, was a crucial cultural touchstone in America in the 1950s. David Shields and Shane Salerno go further in the introduction to their biography Salinger, writing that the book “redefined postwar America and can best be understood as a disguised war novel.”

 Salinger emerged from the war incapable of believing in the heroic, noble ideals we like to think our cultural institutions uphold. Instead of producing a combat novel, as Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Joseph Heller did, Salinger took the trauma of war and embedded it within what looked to the naked eye like a coming-of-age novel.

 It may have even influenced the way we think about teenagers to this day. “It absolutely speaks to that moment the teenager emerges as a recognizable social group,” Salinger scholar Sarah Graham told the BBC. “Before that people went through their teenage years with no sense it was a particular kind of identity. It is the first novel of the modern teenage years.” Indeed, it was only after WWII that a distinctive youth culture began to emerge: in part because more teenagers were in high school and fewer were working to support their families. They had time on their hands and angst in their hearts. “Leisure gave teenagers time to reflect on where they were going,” Dr. Graham said. “The idea of existential angst in some way draws from Catcher in the Rye as much as the novel reflects it. There is a strong dialogue between the book and the teenage experience—they are mutually shaping.” As Adam Golub has pointed out, Holden was the first teenager Americans really knew who refused to grow up, and was celebrated for it. This of course despite the fact that Salinger did not at all write the book for teenagers, and that it was well received—called “brilliant” by reviewer after reviewer—as a novel for adults.

 Famously, the contemporary hype around Catcher was so great that it forced Salinger into the reclusiveness he’s now known for—he was looking, primarily, for privacy, and didn’t mind perpetuating a myth around himself in the process.

 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

 “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” Ellison writes in the opening lines of this much-read, much-assigned, and highly influential novel. (So influential that President Obama modeled Dreams of My Father on it.) The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 1953. In his acceptance speech, Ellison said: “If I were asked in all seriousness just what I considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction, I would reply: Its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.”

 When I examined the rather rigid concepts of reality which informed a number of the works which impressed me and to which I owed a great deal, I was forced to conclude that for me and for so many hundreds of thousands of Americans, reality was simply far more mysterious and uncertain, and at the same time more exciting, and still, despite its raw violence and capriciousness, more promising.

 To see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many triumphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction. I was to dream of a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity, and individual self-realization. A prose which would make use of the richness of our speech, the idiomatic expression, and the rhetorical flourishes from past periods which are still alive among us. Despite my personal failures there must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.

 The novel manages to be many things at once; this is one of its many strengths. “Evenhandedly exposing the hypocrisies and stereotypes of all comers,” Lev Grossman wrote in TIME, “Invisible Man is far more than a race novel, or even a bildungsroman. It’s the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century.”

 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

 Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books we all think we understand—probably because we’ve all had to “analyze” it in high school—but even its author wavered on the point. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury explained it in the context of government censorship:

 I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.

 When asked in 2005 what inspired the book burning in the novel, Bradbury had a pithier response: “Well, Hitler of course.”

 When I was fifteen, he burnt the books in the streets of Berlin. Then along the way I learned about the libraries in Alexandria burning five thousand years ago. That grieved my soul. Since I’m self-educated, that means my educators—the libraries—are in danger. And if it could happen in Alexandria, if it could happen in Berlin, maybe it could happen somewhere up ahead, and my heroes would be killed.

 He also spoke against McCarthyism in his lifetime, and the novel has frequently been interpreted of a criticism of the same, but in later life Bradbury denied this and claimed that it was “a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature,” despite the fact that television was relatively new at the time, just becoming popular. Whatever it means, it remains an enduring classic.

 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

 Initial reviews were mixed when the first volume of Tolkien’s fantasy epic was first published, but the ones that knew, really knew. None other than W. H. Auden reviewed the book in the Times, praising Tolkien’s The Hobbit as “one of the best children’s stories of this century” and writing of his new volume for adults:

 On the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps. . . . [But] if one is to take a tale of this kind seriously, one must feel that, however superficially unlike the world we live in its characters and events may be, it nevertheless holds up the mirror to the only nature we know, our own; in this, too, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded superbly, and what happened in the year of the Shire 1418 in the Third Age of Middle Earth is not only fascinating in A. D. 1954 but also a warning and an inspiration. No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy than The Fellowship of the Ring.

 With the second two books (Tolkien originally meant the three books of The Lord of the Rings to be published as a single volume) it steadily gained readership, exploding in popularity particularly in the 1960s with the publication of the paperbacks, and has become one of the best-selling literary works of all time. It is also generally agreed to be the best literary epic ever written, and has had untold influence on the genre ever since its publication. Tolkien’s worlds have been re-immortalized in the songs of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Rush, etc., and more recently drawn out into increasingly unnecessary films (The Hobbit, I’m looking at you). Less widely known were J. R. R. Tolkien’s rap battle skills.

 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

 Nabokov’s most famous novel was originally published in Paris (in English) in 1955 by a publisher whose other titles included Until She Screams, Tender Thighs, and There’s a Whip in My Valise, and generally ignored until Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year. Then it was roundly disparaged and dismissed as trash, and banned by the French government—no wonder that smuggled-in copies were already being sold for $20 a pop when it was finally published in the US by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, kicking off what Nabokov called in his journal “Hurricane Lolita.” As Steve King writes:

 Within four days of publication in the U.S. the book was into a third printing; by September 13th it had become the first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks; by the end of September, it was #1 on the bestseller lists. By the time Nabokov appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1962, it seemed that the only one who hadn’t read the book was Groucho Marx, who quipped, “I plan to put off reading Lolita for six years, until she’s eighteen.”

 Since then, of course, the novel—along with its eponymous character—has become iconic, though more contemporary readers understand the way the image of Humbert’s nymphet has been twisted as the years have worn on. “With the possible exception of Gatsby, no twentieth-century American literary character penetrated the public consciousness quite like Lolita,” Ira Wells noted in The New Republic.

 Her very name entered the language as a common noun: “a precociously seductive girl,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Gatsby, by contrast, had to settle for a mere adjective: “Gatsbyesque.”) . . . [But] we have forgotten Lolita. At least, we’ve forgotten about the young girl, “standing four feet ten in one sock,” whose childhood deprivation and brutalization and torture subliminally animate the myth that launched a thousand music videos. The publication, reception, and cultural re-fashioning of Lolita over the past 60 years is the story of how a twelve-year-old rape victim named Dolores became a dominant archetype for seductive female sexuality in contemporary America: It is the story of how a girl became a noun.

 But the fact that we’re still talking about, going over the contents and the form and the way its been misunderstood and the way we failed Nabokov and the way Nabokov failed us is only proof of the novel’s significance. It is certainly a book about rape, though it does not invite us to accept rape. It is certainly a book about erotic obsession, though we are meant to pity the obsessed. It is certainly an enduring literary masterpiece.

 James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)

 All three of Baldwin’s most famous works—Go Tell It On the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, and Giovanni’s Room—were published in the 50s, the decade that he established himself as an essential intellectual, social, literary, and moral voice in this country. All of these were defining books of the decade, but I’ve chosen to highlight the essay collection above either of the two novels because of Baldwin’s importance as an activist and social critic. That is, with these ten essays, as well as much of his other writing and speaking, he helped haul America into the second half of the twentieth century. We’re not quite there yet, but much of the ground we’ve gained is due to Baldwin. He also influenced a whole generation of American writers. “Speeches will be given, essays written and hefty books will be published on the various lives of James Baldwin,” Maya Angelou wrote after his death.

 Some fantasies will be broadcast and even some truths will be told. Someone will speak of the essayist James Baldwin in his role as the biblical prophet Isaiah admonishing his country to repent from wickedness and create within itself a clean spirit and a clean heart. Others will examine Baldwin the playwright and novelist who burned with a righteous indignation over the paucity of kindness, the absence of love and the crippling hypocrisy he saw in the streets of the United States and sensed in the hearts of his fellow citizens. I will speak of James Baldwin, my friend and brother. . . . [who] set the stage for me to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, encouraged me to take a course in cinematography in Sweden and told me that I was intelligent and very brave.

 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)

 I can’t tell you how much it pains me that Ayn Rand is the only woman on this list. I would love to have replaced her (and/or some of the others here, cough, Kerouac, cough) with Hannah Arendt, or Flannery O’Connor, or Patricia Highsmith, or Barbara Pym. But there’s no denying the influence of Atlas Shrugged on America—horrible and damaging and Paul Ryan-producing as it may be. Atlas Shrugged is Rand’s treatise on Objectivism (read: “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”), her love letter to capitalism, her libertarian rant, and her magnum opus. It was a bestseller in the week of its release and for 22 weeks in total, and sales rose again after the 2007 financial crisis. It has remained popular among high school students and conservatives (an apparently odd paring, though I can think of a few other qualities that unite them), the former likely in part because the Ayn Rand institute donates 400,000 copies of her novels to high schools every year.

 “I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that Atlas Shrugged has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” bank executive John A. Allison told The New York Times. “It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete.”

 Since its publication it has spurred many, many slobbering tributes that include lines like “Atlas Shrugged has shaped the worldview of many devotees of liberty,” and again, given us Paul Ryan—not to mention Alan Greenspan, who didn’t exactly prevent the recession that readers ran to his idol Ayn Rand to assuage.

 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

 “That’s not writing; that’s typing,” said Truman Capote. “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s,” said Bob Dylan. Whatever you may think of it (and I think it has . . . not held up well), On the Road is without a doubt the most important book, indeed the defining text, of the much-mythologized American “Beat Generation.” It’s not only in retrospect, either—we knew this as soon as the novel was published. “On the Road is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as “beat,” and whose principal avatar he is,” wrote Gilbert Millstein in his 1957 New York Times review, flying in the face of much critical response at the time. “Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the “Lost Generation,” so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the “Beat Generation.” He was correct. “After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road,” William S. Burroughs once remarked.

 This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.

 Leon Uris, Exodus (1958)

 Upon its publication, this novel, a massive chronicle of the founding of the State of Israel, instantly became a huge international phenomenon. The hardcover was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, with a cool 19 weeks in the top spot. The paperback was “the fastest-selling work every published by Bantam,” according to Ira B. Nadel’s Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, and by 1965 was among the top 10 bestsellers of all time. The popularity of the novel, and of the 1960 film adaptation, shaped American perception of Israel, immediately after its publication and beyond. As Uris himself said: “My greatest accomplishment is Exodus. It changed peoples lives, it changed the conception of the Jewish people in the international scene.” For his part, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, said: “As a literary work, it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.”

 The novel, Bradley Burston wrote in Haaretz, “transformed American Jews as no other work has done, before or since . . . it was savaged by critics and academics, and resoundingly ignored by literary prize committees. When the book appeared in 1958, however, it sold in the millions. It was said that it was nearly as common to find a copy of Exodus in American-Jewish households as to find the Bible—and, of the two, not a few Jewish households apparently had only Exodus.”

 Needless to say, this American sympathy for Israel and the American Jewish community changed the face of the country and has had lasting effects—both positive and negative, particularly, in the latter case, due to its gross demonization of Arabs. Also, not for nothing, but many Americans could use the reminder that this novel is a work of fiction.

 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)

 “The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all genius, escapes precise analysis,” Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote in the introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of the text.

 If we could explain it fully, we could reproduce it, and it is of the nature of genius to be irreproducible. Still, there has been no shortage of attempts to explain his literary achievement, an achievement that starts with the fact that Things Fall Apart (1958), the first of the novels in his “African trilogy” defined a starting point for the modern African novel. There are, as critics are quick to point out, earlier examples of extended narrative written in and about Africa by African writers. Some of them—Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954), to name but two also written by Nigerians—remain eminently worth reading. But place them beside the work of Achebe and you will see that in his writing something magnificent and new was going on.

 One reason for this, which often passes without notice, is that Achebe solved a problem that these earlier novels did not. He found a way to represent for a global Anglophone audience the diction of his Igbo homeland, allowing readers of English elsewhere to experience a particular relationship to language and the world in a way that made it seem quite natural—transparent, one might almost say. Achebe enables us to hear the voices of Igboland in a new use of our own language. A measure of his achievement is that Achebe found an African voice in English that is so natural its artifice eludes us.

 Achebe introduced African literature to the rest of the world—and opened the door for a whole host of African writers in the UK and America, both by his success and as an editor of the African Writers Series, published by Heinemann. His first novel has sold over 20 million copies and been translated into 57 languages, and has been taught ever since its publication as a text essential for understanding decolonization and mid-century Africa.

 See also:

 Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950), Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950), C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (first English translation, 1951), Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1951), Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951), Isaac Asimov, the Foundation Trilogy (1951-1953), Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (first English translation, 1952), Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (1952), Bernard Malamud, The Natural (1952), Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952), Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952), John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), Kurt Vonnegut, Piano Player (1952), E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (1952), Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953), James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953), Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953), Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953), William S. Burroughs, Junky (1953), Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953), J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (1953), Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954), William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954), Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (1954), Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954), Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (1955), Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955), The Guinness Book of Records (1955), Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse (first English translation 1955), Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955), John Ashbery, Some Trees (1956), Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (1956), Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956), Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956), John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (1957), Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Towards Freedom (1957), Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (1957), Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1957), Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957), Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (first English translation 1958), Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958), Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958), Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (first English translation, 1958), Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand (1958), T. H. White, The Once and Future King (1958), Robert Bloch, Psycho (1959), Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959), Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959), Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959), Strunk & White, The Elements of Style (1959), D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (unexpurgated U.S. version released 1959)

 Atlas ShruggedAyn RandChinua AchebeExodusFahrenheit 451Invisible ManJ.D. SalingerJ.R.R. TolkienJack KerouacJames BaldwinLeon UrisLolitaNotes of a Native SonOn the RoadRalph EllisonRay Bradburythe 1950sthe books that defined the decadesThe Catcher in the RyeThe Fellowship of the RingThings Fall ApartVladimir Nabokov

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 Emily Temple

 Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. You can buy it here.
 https://www.emilytemple.net/








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Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time.
In the moment, you often can’t tell which books are which. The Great Gatsby wasn’t a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses; the canon looms and obscures. Still, over the next weeks, we’ll be publishing a list a day, each one attempting to define a discrete decade, starting with the 1900s (as you’ve no doubt guessed by now) and counting down until we get to the (nearly complete) 2010s.
Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade—a global lens would require a much longer list. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there’s no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. I’ve simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade—both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I’ve limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners in the 1910s so I could include Ulysses in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I’ll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons.
For our sixth installment, below you’ll find 10 books that defined the 1950s. (Head here for the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s).
 J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) 
Whether you consider Holden an egotistical whiner or a melancholy boy genius, and even if you really, really hate it, there’s no denying that this novel, which has sold more than 65 million copies since its publication (though this number is a few years old and certainly soft), and continues to sell at a healthy clip, was a crucial cultural touchstone in America in the 1950s.  David Shields and Shane Salerno go further in the introduction to their biography Salinger, writing that the book “redefined postwar America and can best be understood as a disguised war novel.”
Salinger emerged from the war incapable of believing in the heroic, noble ideals we like to think our cultural institutions uphold. Instead of producing a combat novel, as Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Joseph Heller did, Salinger took the trauma of war and embedded it within what looked to the naked eye like a coming-of-age novel.
It may have even influenced the way we think about teenagers to this day. “It absolutely speaks to that moment the teenager emerges as a recognizable social group,” Salinger scholar Sarah Graham told the BBC. “Before that people went through their teenage years with no sense it was a particular kind of identity. It is the first novel of the modern teenage years.” Indeed, it was only after WWII that a distinctive youth culture began to emerge: in part because more teenagers were in high school and fewer were working to support their families. They had time on their hands and angst in their hearts. “Leisure gave teenagers time to reflect on where they were going,” Dr. Graham said. “The idea of existential angst in some way draws from Catcher in the Rye as much as the novel reflects it. There is a strong dialogue between the book and the teenage experience—they are mutually shaping.” As Adam Golub has pointed out, Holden was the first teenager Americans really knew who refused to grow up, and was celebrated for it. This of course despite the fact that Salinger did not at all write the book for teenagers, and that it was well received—called “brilliant” by reviewer after reviewer—as a novel for adults.
Famously, the contemporary hype around Catcher was so great that it forced Salinger into the reclusiveness he’s now known for—he was looking, primarily, for privacy, and didn’t mind perpetuating a myth around himself in the process.
 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) 
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” Ellison writes in the opening lines of this much-read, much-assigned, and highly influential novel. (So influential that President Obama modeled  Dreams of My Father on it.) The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 1953. In his acceptance speech, Ellison said: “If I were asked in all seriousness just what I considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction, I would reply: Its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.”
When I examined the rather rigid concepts of reality which informed a number of the works which impressed me and to which I owed a great deal, I was forced to conclude that for me and for so many hundreds of thousands of Americans, reality was simply far more mysterious and uncertain, and at the same time more exciting, and still, despite its raw violence and capriciousness, more promising.
To see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many triumphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction. I was to dream of a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity, and individual self-realization. A prose which would make use of the richness of our speech, the idiomatic expression, and the rhetorical flourishes from past periods which are still alive among us. Despite my personal failures there must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
The novel manages to be many things at once; this is one of its many strengths. “Evenhandedly exposing the hypocrisies and stereotypes of all comers,” Lev Grossman wrote in  TIME , “Invisible Man is far more than a race novel, or even a bildungsroman. It’s the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century.”
 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953) 
 Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books we all think we understand—probably because we’ve all had to “analyze” it in high school—but even its author wavered on the point. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury explained it in the context of government censorship:
I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.
When asked in 2005 what inspired the book burning in the novel, Bradbury had a pithier response: “Well, Hitler of course.”
When I was fifteen, he burnt the books in the streets of Berlin. Then along the way I learned about the libraries in Alexandria burning five thousand years ago. That grieved my soul. Since I’m self-educated, that means my educators—the libraries—are in danger. And if it could happen in Alexandria, if it could happen in Berlin, maybe it could happen somewhere up ahead, and my heroes would be killed.
He also spoke against McCarthyism in his lifetime, and the novel has frequently been interpreted of a criticism of the same, but in later life Bradbury denied this and claimed that it was “a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature,” despite the fact that television was relatively new at the time, just becoming popular. Whatever it means, it remains an enduring classic.
 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) 
Initial reviews were mixed when the first volume of Tolkien’s fantasy epic was first published, but the ones that knew, really knew. None other than W. H. Auden reviewed the book in the  Times , praising Tolkien’s The Hobbit as “one of the best children’s stories of this century” and writing of his new volume for adults:
On the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps. . . . [But] if one is to take a tale of this kind seriously, one must feel that, however superficially unlike the world we live in its characters and events may be, it nevertheless holds up the mirror to the only nature we know, our own; in this, too, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded superbly, and what happened in the year of the Shire 1418 in the Third Age of Middle Earth is not only fascinating in A. D. 1954 but also a warning and an inspiration. No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy than The Fellowship of the Ring.
With the second two books (Tolkien originally meant the three books of The Lord of the Rings to be published as a single volume) it steadily gained readership, exploding in popularity particularly in the 1960s with the publication of the paperbacks, and has become one of the best-selling literary works of all time. It is also generally agreed to be the best literary epic ever written, and has had untold influence on the genre ever since its publication. Tolkien’s worlds have been re-immortalized in the songs of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Rush, etc., and more recently drawn out into increasingly unnecessary films (The Hobbit, I’m looking at you). Less widely known were J. R. R. Tolkien’s rap battle skills.
 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) 
Nabokov’s most famous novel was originally published in Paris (in English) in 1955 by a publisher whose other titles included Until She Screams, Tender Thighs, and There’s a Whip in My Valise, and generally ignored until Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year. Then it was roundly disparaged and dismissed as trash, and banned by the French government—no wonder that smuggled-in copies were already being sold for $20 a pop when it was finally published in the US by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, kicking off what Nabokov called in his journal “Hurricane Lolita.” As Steve King writes:
Within four days of publication in the U.S. the book was into a third printing; by September 13th it had become the first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks; by the end of September, it was #1 on the bestseller lists. By the time Nabokov appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1962, it seemed that the only one who hadn’t read the book was Groucho Marx, who quipped, “I plan to put off reading Lolita for six years, until she’s eighteen.”
Since then, of course, the novel—along with its eponymous character—has become iconic, though more contemporary readers understand the way the image of Humbert’s nymphet has been twisted as the years have worn on. “With the possible exception of Gatsby, no twentieth-century American literary character penetrated the public consciousness quite like Lolita,” Ira Wells noted in  The New Republic .
Her very name entered the language as a common noun: “a precociously seductive girl,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Gatsby, by contrast, had to settle for a mere adjective: “Gatsbyesque.”) . . . [But] we have forgotten Lolita. At least, we’ve forgotten about the young girl, “standing four feet ten in one sock,” whose childhood deprivation and brutalization and torture subliminally animate the myth that launched a thousand music videos. The publication, reception, and cultural re-fashioning of Lolita over the past 60 years is the story of how a twelve-year-old rape victim named Dolores became a dominant archetype for seductive female sexuality in contemporary America: It is the story of how a girl became a noun.
But the fact that we’re still talking about, going over the contents and the form and the way its been misunderstood and the way we failed Nabokov and the way Nabokov failed us is only proof of the novel’s significance. It is certainly a book about rape, though it does not invite us to accept rape. It is certainly a book about erotic obsession, though we are meant to pity the obsessed. It is certainly an enduring literary masterpiece.
 James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955) 
All three of Baldwin’s most famous works—Go Tell It On the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, and Giovanni’s Room—were published in the 50s, the decade that he established himself as an essential intellectual, social, literary, and moral voice in this country. All of these were defining books of the decade, but I’ve chosen to highlight the essay collection above either of the two novels because of Baldwin’s importance as an activist and social critic. That is, with these ten essays, as well as much of his other writing and speaking, he helped haul America into the second half of the twentieth century. We’re not quite there yet, but much of the ground we’ve gained is due to Baldwin. He also influenced a whole generation of American writers. “Speeches will be given, essays written and hefty books will be published on the various lives of James Baldwin,” Maya Angelou wrote after his death.
Some fantasies will be broadcast and even some truths will be told. Someone will speak of the essayist James Baldwin in his role as the biblical prophet Isaiah admonishing his country to repent from wickedness and create within itself a clean spirit and a clean heart. Others will examine Baldwin the playwright and novelist who burned with a righteous indignation over the paucity of kindness, the absence of love and the crippling hypocrisy he saw in the streets of the United States and sensed in the hearts of his fellow citizens. I will speak of James Baldwin, my friend and brother. . . . [who] set the stage for me to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, encouraged me to take a course in cinematography in Sweden and told me that I was intelligent and very brave.
 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957) 
I can’t tell you how much it pains me that Ayn Rand is the only woman on this list. I would love to have replaced her (and/or some of the others here, cough, Kerouac, cough) with Hannah Arendt, or Flannery O’Connor, or Patricia Highsmith, or Barbara Pym. But there’s no denying the influence of Atlas Shrugged on America—horrible and damaging and Paul Ryan-producing as it may be. Atlas Shrugged is Rand’s treatise on Objectivism (read: “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”), her love letter to capitalism, her libertarian rant, and her magnum opus. It was a bestseller in the week of its release and for 22 weeks in total, and sales rose again after the 2007 financial crisis. It has remained popular among high school students and conservatives (an apparently odd paring, though I can think of a few other qualities that unite them), the former likely in part because the Ayn Rand institute donates 400,000 copies of her novels to high schools every year.
“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that Atlas Shrugged has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” bank executive John A. Allison told  The New York Times . “It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete.”
Since its publication it has spurred many, many slobbering tributes that include lines like “Atlas Shrugged has shaped the worldview of many devotees of liberty,” and again, given us Paul Ryan—not to mention Alan Greenspan, who didn’t exactly prevent the recession that readers ran to his idol Ayn Rand to assuage.
 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) 
“That’s not writing; that’s typing,” said Truman Capote. “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s,”  said Bob Dylan. Whatever you may think of it (and I think it has . . . not held up well), On the Road is without a doubt the most important book, indeed the defining text, of the much-mythologized American “Beat Generation.” It’s not only in retrospect, either—we knew this as soon as the novel was published. “On the Road   is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as “beat,” and whose principal avatar he is,” wrote Gilbert Millstein in his 1957 New York Times review, flying in the face of much critical response at the time. “Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the “Lost Generation,” so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the “Beat Generation.” He was correct. “After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road,” William S. Burroughs once remarked.
This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.
 Leon Uris, Exodus (1958) 
Upon its publication, this novel, a massive chronicle of the founding of the State of Israel, instantly became a huge international phenomenon. The hardcover was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, with a cool 19 weeks in the top spot. The paperback was “the fastest-selling work every published by Bantam,” according to Ira B. Nadel’s Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, and by 1965 was among the top 10 bestsellers of all time. The popularity of the novel, and of the 1960 film adaptation, shaped American perception of Israel, immediately after its publication and beyond. As Uris himself said: “My greatest accomplishment is Exodus. It changed peoples lives, it changed the conception of the Jewish people in the international scene.” For his part, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, said: “As a literary work, it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.”
The novel, Bradley Burston wrote in  Haaretz , “transformed American Jews as no other work has done, before or since . . . it was savaged by critics and academics, and resoundingly ignored by literary prize committees. When the book appeared in 1958, however, it sold in the millions. It was said that it was nearly as common to find a copy of Exodus in American-Jewish households as to find the Bible—and, of the two, not a few Jewish households apparently had only Exodus.”
Needless to say, this American sympathy for Israel and the American Jewish community changed the face of the country and has had lasting effects—both positive and negative, particularly, in the latter case, due to its gross demonization of Arabs. Also, not for nothing, but many Americans could use the reminder that this novel is a work of fiction.
 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) 
“The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all genius, escapes precise analysis,” Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote in the introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of the text.
If we could explain it fully, we could reproduce it, and it is of the nature of genius to be irreproducible. Still, there has been no shortage of attempts to explain his literary achievement, an achievement that starts with the fact that Things Fall Apart (1958), the first of the novels in his “African trilogy” defined a starting point for the modern African novel. There are, as critics are quick to point out, earlier examples of extended narrative written in and about Africa by African writers. Some of them—Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954), to name but two also written by Nigerians—remain eminently worth reading. But place them beside the work of Achebe and you will see that in his writing something magnificent and new was going on.
One reason for this, which often passes without notice, is that Achebe solved a problem that these earlier novels did not. He found a way to represent for a global Anglophone audience the diction of his Igbo homeland, allowing readers of English elsewhere to experience a particular relationship to language and the world in a way that made it seem quite natural—transparent, one might almost say. Achebe enables us to hear the voices of Igboland in a new use of our own language. A measure of his achievement is that Achebe found an African voice in English that is so natural its artifice eludes us.
Achebe introduced African literature to the rest of the world—and opened the door for a whole host of African writers in the UK and America, both by his success and as an editor of the African Writers Series, published by Heinemann. His first novel has sold over 20 million copies and been translated into 57 languages, and has been taught ever since its publication as a text essential for understanding decolonization and mid-century Africa.
 See also: 
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950), Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950), C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (first English translation, 1951), Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1951), Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951), Isaac Asimov, the Foundation Trilogy (1951-1953), Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (first English translation, 1952), Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (1952), Bernard Malamud, The Natural (1952), Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952), Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952), John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), Kurt Vonnegut, Piano Player (1952), E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (1952), Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953), James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953), Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953), Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953), William S. Burroughs, Junky (1953), Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953), J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (1953), Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954), William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954), Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (1954), Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954), Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (1955), Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955), The Guinness Book of Records (1955), Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse (first English translation 1955), Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955), John Ashbery, Some Trees (1956), Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (1956), Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956), Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956), John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (1957), Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Towards Freedom (1957), Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (1957), Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1957), Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957), Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (first English translation 1958), Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958), Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958), Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (first English translation, 1958), Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand (1958), T. H. White, The Once and Future King (1958), Robert Bloch, Psycho (1959), Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959), Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959), Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959), Strunk &amp; White, The Elements of Style (1959), D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (unexpurgated U.S. version released 1959)
A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1950s
https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1950s/
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A Short Guide to Writing About Art book by Sylvan Barnet
2023-01-01
Sylvan Barnet
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<p>
 This is a must have for any art major that is currently or will be going into any college Art Program -- especially the analysis of Art via Art History classes. The directives are clear and easy to follow. Barnet breaks down all facets of writing -- from Reviews of exhibits to critical analysis of art work. This book can also be helpful in other classes as it guides the reader into writing more concisely and in a more direct manner. This is an excellent addition to any College Student and/or Faculty library.
 </p>
</div>
<div>
<h3>
</h3>
<p>
 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 16 years ago
 </p>
<p>
 I purchased this book at the beginning of the semester and have found it an invaluable resource. This is my first term as a graduate student, and I don't think I could have survived had it not been for this book. It gives useful commentary, helpful hints and a terrific reference section for footnotes and bibliographies. It addresses real problems that often occur in writing an art history paper and provides insightful solutions that encourage independent thinking. It also includes a section on essay exams which gets a quick read through when I take a test. I had several "a ha!" moments when reading it for the first time, and now I keep it within arms reach whenever I write. The price was a little steep, so I hesitated in buying, but when I finally made the purchase I was glad that I had. 
 </p>
</div>
<div>
<h3>
</h3>
<p>
 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 17 years ago
 </p>
<p>
 This book is about writing on art.It has sections to equip you with what to keep in mind while writing an essay, research paper or review of an exhibit. The book has sample examples for comparitive essays and reviews with a good analysis on the organization of the material, its purpose and aptness for the reader. The checklist on writing on art can be extended to writing on books too. The many references to artists of all times with your interest will give you a walk through the whole of history of art. The sections on what is art, interpretation, the importance of seeing for creating art and quotes by many writers and artists are interesting to read. 
 </p>
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 ISBN: 0136138551

 ISBN13: 9780136138556

 A Short Guide to Writing about Art

 by Sylvan Barnet
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 The best-selling guide to writing about art Sylvan Barnet's A Short Guide to Writing About Art guides students through every aspect of writing about art. Students are shown how to analyze pictures... This description may be from another edition of this product.

 Edition DetailsProfessional ReviewsAwards
 Format : Paperback
 Language : English
 ISBN : 0136138551
 ISBN13 : 9780136138556
 Release Date : January 2007
 Publisher : Prentice Hall
 Length : 378 Pages
 Weight : 0.85 lbs.
 Dimensions : 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.2"

 Related Subjects

 Academic & Commercial Art Arts, Music & Photography Creative Writing & Composition Journalism & Nonfiction Language Arts Literature Reference Textbooks Writing

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 5 ratings
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 A Great Help

 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 14 years ago
 I originally purchased this book as a guide to writing for my critical essays in art history classes. I have found it to be so helpful. It includes the kind of information that you don't even think about until you actually need to utilize them..so grateful it was available to me. The explanations and provided examples are very clear. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve in their writing style.

 very useful

 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 15 years ago
 This is a wonderful book for people like me who write research papers and wonder if they are on the right track. Easy to read and extremely useful in giving tips and guidance. Must have book.

 A must-have

 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 15 years ago
 This is a must have for any art major that is currently or will be going into any college Art Program -- especially the analysis of Art via Art History classes. The directives are clear and easy to follow. Barnet breaks down all facets of writing -- from Reviews of exhibits to critical analysis of art work. This book can also be helpful in other classes as it guides the reader into writing more concisely and in a more direct manner. This is an excellent addition to any College Student and/or Faculty library.

 Great reference guide

 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 16 years ago
 I purchased this book at the beginning of the semester and have found it an invaluable resource. This is my first term as a graduate student, and I don't think I could have survived had it not been for this book. It gives useful commentary, helpful hints and a terrific reference section for footnotes and bibliographies. It addresses real problems that often occur in writing an art history paper and provides insightful solutions that encourage independent thinking. It also includes a section on essay exams which gets a quick read through when I take a test. I had several "a ha!" moments when reading it for the first time, and now I keep it within arms reach whenever I write. The price was a little steep, so I hesitated in buying, but when I finally made the purchase I was glad that I had.

 How to read a potato in a painting as a potato and not a solar symbol?

 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 17 years ago
 This book is about writing on art.It has sections to equip you with what to keep in mind while writing an essay, research paper or review of an exhibit. The book has sample examples for comparitive essays and reviews with a good analysis on the organization of the material, its purpose and aptness for the reader. The checklist on writing on art can be extended to writing on books too. The many references to artists of all times with your interest will give you a walk through the whole of history of art. The sections on what is art, interpretation, the importance of seeing for creating art and quotes by many writers and artists are interesting to read.
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Select Format  
 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 14 years ago
 
 I originally purchased this book as a guide to writing for my critical essays in art history classes. I have found it to be so helpful. It includes the kind of information that you don't even think about until you actually need to utilize them..so grateful it was available to me. The explanations and provided examples are very clear. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve in their writing style.
 
 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 15 years ago
 
 This is a wonderful book for people like me who write research papers and wonder if they are on the right track. Easy to read and extremely useful in giving tips and guidance. Must have book.
 
 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 15 years ago
 
 This is a must have for any art major that is currently or will be going into any college Art Program -- especially the analysis of Art via Art History classes. The directives are clear and easy to follow. Barnet breaks down all facets of writing -- from Reviews of exhibits to critical analysis of art work. This book can also be helpful in other classes as it guides the reader into writing more concisely and in a more direct manner. This is an excellent addition to any College Student and/or Faculty library.
 
 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 16 years ago
 
 I purchased this book at the beginning of the semester and have found it an invaluable resource. This is my first term as a graduate student, and I don't think I could have survived had it not been for this book. It gives useful commentary, helpful hints and a terrific reference section for footnotes and bibliographies. It addresses real problems that often occur in writing an art history paper and provides insightful solutions that encourage independent thinking. It also includes a section on essay exams which gets a quick read through when I take a test. I had several "a ha!" moments when reading it for the first time, and now I keep it within arms reach whenever I write. The price was a little steep, so I hesitated in buying, but when I finally made the purchase I was glad that I had. 
 
 Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 17 years ago
 
 This book is about writing on art.It has sections to equip you with what to keep in mind while writing an essay, research paper or review of an exhibit. The book has sample examples for comparitive essays and reviews with a good analysis on the organization of the material, its purpose and aptness for the reader. The checklist on writing on art can be extended to writing on books too. The many references to artists of all times with your interest will give you a walk through the whole of history of art. The sections on what is art, interpretation, the importance of seeing for creating art and quotes by many writers and artists are interesting to read.
A Short Guide to Writing About Art book by Sylvan Barnet
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-short-guide-to-writing-about-art_sylvan-barnet/246052/item/3818521/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw0oyYBhDGARIsAMZEuMtkf9hzGSSGXLTjvbzy4yRjEmre_EzNbndfLZ52AKm9XsJIrU9ddRkaAmR-EALw_wcB#idiq=3818521&edition=5967083
https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Prose-Techniques-Thomas-Kane/dp/0195036786/ref=asc_df_0195036786/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=416769328220&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13495769115234592572&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031951&hvtargid=pla-932135635804&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=94182731256&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=416769328220&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13495769115234592572&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031951&hvtargid=pla-932135635804
Amazon.com: Writing Prose: Techniques and Purposes: 9780195036787: Kane, Thomas S., Peters, Leonard J.: Books
2002-06-12
Thomas S Kane
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 Writing Prose: Techniques and Purposes 6th Edition

 by Thomas S. Kane (Editor), Leonard J. Peters (Editor)
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 This anthology teaches writing by demonstrating the techniques and literary styles of established authors.
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 1. ISBN-10
 0195036786
 2. ISBN-13
 978-0195036787
 3. Edition
 6th
 4. Publisher
 Oxford University Press
 5. Publication date
 January 23, 1986
 6. Language
 English
 7. Dimensions
 1.26 x 9 x 6 inches
 8. Print length
 688 pages
 9. See all details
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 Editorial Reviews

 Review

 "The briefness and excellence of the selections allows for close careful and enjoyable analyses."--Dorothy Stempton, University of Connecticut at Hartford

 About the Author

 Thomas S. Kane is at University of Connecticut, Waterbury.

 Product details

 * Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 6th edition (January 23, 1986)
 * Language ‏ : ‎ English
 * Paperback ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
 * ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195036786
 * ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195036787
 * Reading age ‏ : ‎ 17 years and up
 * Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.05 pounds
 * Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 1.26 x 9 x 6 inches
 * Best Sellers Rank: #241,499 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )
 + #170 in Rhetoric (Books)
 + #541 in Professional
 + #721 in Fiction Writing Reference (Books)
 * Customer Reviews:
 4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 7 ratings
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  Rob
  5.0 out of 5 stars You will become a better writer if you use this book well.
  Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2002
  This book is full of great prose that is fun to read and questions that really make you think about the techniques used. It takes a really long time to fully work through this book from start to finish, but it is worth every minute. Especially if, like me, you haven't been to college. I can only speculate that in school you'd have a few good writing classes that teach these concepts. This book will open your mind and you'll really begin to understand the importance of word order and general organization in writing. It's a great book.
  17 people found this helpful
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  Nathan A. Reid
  4.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant book!
  Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2009
  Verified Purchase
  This book is fantastic! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to improve their writing. The book covers so much, and in a way that gets you thinking about the possibilies of what writing can be rather than just laying out rigid rules and 'ideally don't do this' examples.
  6 people found this helpful
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  Sam Clement
  3.0 out of 5 stars HARD TO READ
  Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2017
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  DIFFICULT TO READ.
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The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more
Amazon.com: Writing Prose: Techniques and Purposes: 9780195036787: Kane, Thomas S., Peters, Leonard J.: Books
https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Prose-Techniques-Thomas-Kane/dp/0195036786/ref=asc_df_0195036786/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=416769328220&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13495769115234592572&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031951&hvtargid=pla-932135635804&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=94182731256&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=416769328220&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13495769115234592572&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031951&hvtargid=pla-932135635804