It Was The Best of Times, or Maybe It Wasn't (OT)

Speaking of books about writing, as I was the other day....

Certain ideas are strong and clean and simple and have a powerful appeal because of it; while at the same time they have the slight disadvantage of being wrong. The most popular writer's guidebook book in America has long been The Elements of Style, more often called "Strunk and White" after William Strunk jr., the book's professor author, and E.B. White, Strunk's former and most famous student and the book's original reviser.

The problem with Strunk and White is that, despite being strong and clean and simple, it's often wrong. Here for example is what is arguably the most famous sentence in all of Dickens, the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Here's the same sentence as it would be rewritten according to Bill Strunk's schoolmarmly dicta:

The times were good in some ways, bad in others.

The book is excellent for improving inept writers and a priceless primer for students; but it's mainly useless for improving the art of writers who already know their way around words and have an ear for them, and have honed their chops enough that their innate personal style has already emerged. The writing of most of the greatest stylists, including White, would be hacked to bits by the thorough application of much of Strunk's advice.

As I keep promising to stop sayin', just sayin'.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Help Support Mike or TOP
Give the writer a little gift or Patronize our affiliates

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Dyer-Bennet: "You're right, of course. But that statement is true of every writing book—except for the ones that fail by not being good even for that. The books really only try to get you to understand some general principles, and they're good to follow—unless you're a master practitioner of writing, in which case you're expected to strike out on your own. And, of course: '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.' —Dorothy Parker."

William: "In my humble opinion John McPhee strikes the perfect balance between following Strunk and White and achieving a personal style. In academic and corporate environments, over the decades I experienced more writers who would benefit from applying S&W than those whose personal style suffered by well-intended (but blind) inflexible adherence to S&W. The irony of the above run-on sentence does not elude me."

John Camp: "I don't think I've ever commented on Strunk and White, though of course I've read the book a couple of times. Even the author of the best book on writing, Stephen King, recommends it. But you're absolutely right: it's often wrong. My take on it, as a professional writer, is that the book was written for Cornell students who were about to go off to Wall Street and needed to know how to write a crisp, short memo to the boss. On the other hand, it could ruin the prospects of any poet who read it."

[Our friend John Camp writes novels under the name John Sandford. —Ed.]

Bill Tyler (partial comment): "There's a recurring misconception in the comments that Strunk and White requires a skeletal approach to prose. If we look at the famous 'Omit needless words,' prescription from the 1918 edition (via bartleby.com—there was only Strunk in that edition) we find: '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 every word tell.' So we have a topic sentence, then a sentence with four parallel thoughts. Finally, there's a caution that the principle is not brevity or lack of detail, but efficiency. Each word should contribute to the overall thought.

"What Strunk is advocating is avoidance of useless fluff. The Dickens passage follows this precept admirably. It even mirrors the structure of the Strunk paragraph, with pairs of parallels elaborating the theme. Each pair of contradictions expresses the paradox of the times from a different perspective, and each contributes to building the overall theme of the paragraph."

Comments

[Dogman]

Presumably, the parallel of Strunk and White for photographers would be all those traditional rules of photography that have evolved with time. Such wisdom as The Rule of Thirds, Expose for the Shadows and all the others that currently escape my memory (sorry, I'm feeling my age, it's morning and I'm restricted to only one cup of coffee these days). While helpful to the inexperienced or inept, blindly following such strict rules often restrict creativity and result in mediocrity.

[Speed]

It is by expanding beyond standards that we progress.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

This item is anything but "off-topic" to your blog's theme, Mike. Following the most expeditious path to the proverbial point can crop the very life from a photograph just as surely as from a piece of prose. Writers who have lost (or never found) their way seem to end up attending endless workshops and buying shelves of How-to-Write self-help tomes. (I think most readers can fill in the next sentence.)

[Anthony Shaughnessy]

I find that Dickens opening passage to be tedious and overly verbose but I was always more of a fan of Raymond Chandler.
Anthony

[Lord of Light]

The best book on writing style is "Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace" by Joseph M. Williams. Its guidance on style derives from how great writers actually write. The style books most people have are descended from the work of 19th century grammar rule scolds who came up with arbitrary conventions that are often at odds with great literature as Mike shows us above with Dickens.

[Sophia]

Strunk and White isn't 'wrong' because Dickens was creative anymore than books explaining the fundamentals of exposure aren't 'wrong' because photographers use exposure creatively.

Lawyers know another excellent manual for clear and readable writing - https://www.sec.gov/pdf/handbook.pdf#page43. Now THAT would really demolish Dickens. But every time I'm forced to read legal gobbledygook or marketing materials or websites with all capital letters sans serif, I want to mass mail the SEC handbook. It isn't 'wrong', either, even though it is far from a creative tool.

[NikoJorj]

Funny how that mirrors the bits about rhetorics I recently re-found in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : a book that's hard to agree completely with, which is its great strength in that it makes you think twice about anything it says.
But I'm making too long sentences, I' reading too much Proust and not enough Strunk and White.

[Michael Perini]

......but isn't that the way we learn (or are taught) most everything ?
First we learn how not to screw up too badly, then we learn helpful but over generalized 'rules' . Then over time those rules continue to be helpful for the many, while the few who form the cream that rises, realize that the 'rules' were just starting ponts.
So in that sense the book seems to be dong exactly what it was intended to do.

[MarkR]

I am reminded of this interview from NPR on the 50th anniversary of Strunk & White, provocatively titled "A Half Century of 'Stupid Grammar Advice." http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=103171738

[Bill Tyler]

Shakespeare, too, would fail the Strunk and White test. But that's not the point. S&W addresses common faults in poor writing. It does not and cannot tell you how to make your writing soar. If there were a formula for that, we'd all be great writers.

[Dave I.]

"The irony of the above run-on sentence does not elude me." - William.

I wouldn't consider that sentence a "run-on". It reads just fine the way it is. It conveys your thoughts without any confusion.

Mike,

Would Strunk and White really ruin that parallel structure of Charles Dickens? :)

[Armond Perretta]

Mike, short version: When you hit on "Strunk and White" you're gettin' personal. Take heed.

[Eolake]

THANK YOU.

I have long been irritated by this book's insistence that everything be cut down to its skeletal minimum. You don't love a person for his/her skeleton, and you don't love a book for it plot outline.

[hugh crawford]

Most expressive disciplines have rules and conventions.
Most practitioners follow them.
But sometimes the rules are best broken to make something stick out.
Like a sore thumb or starting a sentence or two with conjunctions.

As for the work of Strunk and White the edition with Maira Kalman’s drawings is the one to get
https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-Illustrated-William-Strunk/dp/0143112724/

https://youtu.be/5mPcDKb6pQ0

[hugh crawford]

Oh, I almost forgot the opera version .

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4985137

[Jim]

As an author of a half dozen technical books and hundreds of articles, ap nores, web pages, etc. plus a photographer who has taken more than hundred thousand photos over the last 50+ years, I must say I have read little advice about these pursuits I care for. I think writing needs to be understandable to be successful; photos should either convey a story or appeal to one's aesthetics. That's good enuff (sic).
"Just sayin' "

[Tim Auger]

The important thing about style guides is to know when to ignore them. Once you get that, they can be very helpful. A bit like Word for Mac's checking of spelling and grammar - which insists on substituting an active verb for every passive verb, and abolishing the semicolon. Well, sorry, Word, I disagree and very often your prescriptions destroy either the 'music' of the sentence, or the sense, or both.

For my purposes, the Economist style guide (available in book form) is the most useful; and generally I prefer UK style guides to US guides - the latter tend to be too bossy, in many instances without good reason. And American copy-editors often over-edit, in my experience.

[Bear.]

Whose style?

[Mao]

Re: Dickens
TLDR.

[Geoffrey Heard]

I'm with Jim, even unto the half century duration, but I'm not at all sure about the number of photographs.

I have never read Strunk and White although in my experience on international forums, I have seen many Americans apparently mesmerized by it. They seem to to take it as some sort of holy writ. "But S&W says blah blah blah," they respond triumphantly, as though that caps discussion, when you suggest a more elegant or more colloquial or just different way of saying something they have put forward which is clompingly mundane.

Mike, and here I am perhaps foolishly defending S&W despite never have read it (in fact, never having even seen it so far as I can remember), I have seen your example before and to my mind, it is fake. Dickens was speaking in the superlative. Surely if you wished to render it down to a single short sentence, you should stay in the superlative, so you have something like: "It was both the best and worst of times." And you would add a little more to explain that, adding, perhaps, "…with society riven by extremes and extremists of every kind."

Or am I in error? Does S&W disallow superlatives?

Cheers, Geoff

[Geoffrey Heard]

Have done that rewrite, I do need to add that it is still crap compared with the original. I love that opening paragraph.

Cheers, Geoff

[Paul Van]

Writing is much like cooking (or photography): there are a great many books suggesting how you should approach it - but few master both the technical and artistic aspects. There are, however, a great many technicians. :)

[scott kirkpatrick]

I think viewing Strunk and White as excellent advice to Cornell students who would have to write short effective memos to their bosses on Wall Street in the near future is right on target. And does not discredit the book one bit.

Writing for a newspaper was my first exposure to having writing judged for clarity, simplicity, and brevity. Pyramid style, short grafs and all that force you to unravel incomplete and jumbled thoughts into one clear idea per sentence. With practice the ideas sometimes flow into something stronger, but that comes later.

[Chris Bertram]

S&W reject the singular "they", a sure sign of a manual where fussiness trumps common sense.

[Richard Parkin]

Not sure that Dickens is the best writer to use as an exemplar here. Didn't he speak a lot of his stuff as he wrote and performed a lot of it? I believe he also owed a lot to his years as a court reporter writing down the speech of Londoners.

[Patrick Perez]

Didn't E.B. White himself say that the work shouldn't be considered a reference per se, but a guide for developing one's style? IIRC he even admitted to there being contradictions in the text, because the book shouldn't be dogmatically followed.

Patrick