A Guide To Vigorous Writing

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 sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. There you have a short, valuable essay on the nature and beauty of brevity — fifty-nine words that could change the world. Having recovered from his adventure in prolixity (fifty-nine words were a lot of words in the tight world of William Strunk Jr.), the professor proceeds to give a few quick lessons in pruning. Students learn to cut the dead-wood from "this is a subject that," reducing it to "this subject," a saving of three words. They learn to trim "used for fuel purposes" down to "used for fuel." They learn that they are being chatterboxes when they say "the question as to whether" and that they should just say "whether" — a saving of four words out of a possible five.
The professor devotes a special paragraph to the vile expression the fact that, a phrase
that causes him to quiver with revulsion. The expression, he says, should be "revised out of every sentence in which it occurs." But a shadow of gloom seems to hang over the page, and you feel that he knows how hopeless his cause is. I suppose I have written the fact that a thousand times in the heat of composition, revised it out maybe five hundred times in the cool aftermath. To be batting only .500 this late in the season, to fail half the time to connect with this fat pitch, saddens me, for it seems a betrayal of the man who showed me how to swing at it and made the swinging seem worthwhile.
I treasure The Elements of Style for its sharp advice, but I treasure it even more for the audacity and self-confidence of its author. Will knew where he stood. He was so sure of where he stood, and made his position so clear and so plausible, that his peculiar stance has continued to invigorate me — and, I am sure, thousands of other ex-students — during the years that have intervened since our first encounter. He had a number of likes and dislikes that were almost as whimsical as the choice of a necktie, yet he made them seem utterly convincing.. He disliked the word forceful and advised us to use forciblei instead He felt that the word clever was greatly overused: "It is best restricted to ingenuity
displayed in small matters." He despised the expression student body, which he termed
gruesome, and made a special trip downtown to the Alumni News office one day to protest the expression and suggest that studentry be substituted — a coinage of his own, which he felt was similar to citizenry. I am told that the News editor was so charmed by the visit, if not by the word, that he ordered the student body buried, never to rise again. Studentry has taken its place. It's not much of an improvement, but it does sound less cadaverous, and it made Will Strunk quite happy.
Some years ago, when the heir to the throne of England was a child, I noticed a headline
in the Times about Bonnie Prince Charlie: "CHARLES' TONSILS OUT." Immediately Rule
1 leapt to mind.
1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's. Follow this rule whatever the final consonant.
Thus write,
Charles's friend
Burns's poems
the witch's malice

You see how beautiful is this way of writing is and if you follow the rules carefully yoully end up with beautifully crafted story.