First Impressions

I know that this blog is late... but to be honest, it would have been impossible for me to do it on time since I didn't buy the book until a few days ago. Now that I have actually sat down and read it, I am a bit surprised by how few people seemed to like it. It wasn't exactly enjoyable, but I didn't find it a particularly difficult read. Taking it in small chunks helped ease the monotiny of it, and also gave me the time to let it sink in.

The first thing that struck me about this book is the use of the word "Style" in the title. This book is geared towards a very specific style as it currently stands, as opposed to dicussing different styles, or even "stylist" writing. Instead, it is almost completely concerned with what I call "academic writing", or the writing of something where the point is to share an idea as concretely and obviously as possible. To me, writing stylistically involves some flowery language, some metaphors and apstract ideas, and other, more cereibal, devices. A book that claims to discuss and teach "style" should be more open-ended and encompassing than this. I recognize that the last chapter touches more on this particular aspect, but it seems almost as if it were added as an after thought.

However, this book is extremely useful for the "academic style" of writing. It gives advice on ways to make writing more clear, more direct, and more bold. This can be great for college papers, publications in academic journals, resumes and business related writing, etc. It teaches the "correct" way to write, which helps you appear more professional. In a similar vien, the chapter on commonly misused words was useful, and sometimes even interesting.

Finally, I think that the size of the book is both conveinent (who could stand to keep reading more material like this?), and a good illistration of the writers's point. Failing to follow a rule in the same paragraph that you are using to illustrate the rule is so distracting that the reader is more likely to remember that the writer was hypocritical than the actual rule itself. Had Strunk written too much, then he would be breaking his own rule of "Omit needless words," which is a commonly stressed thread throughout The Elements of Style. The rule is a good one when you do not have to meet a certain length quota, and because so many teachers do enforce a specifed length, it is a rule that almost all students not only break intentionally, but are almost forced to learn to NOT follow the rule.

I don't believe that I will consult this book nearly as often as I could, or probably should, but I feel that having read it once has given me a lot of things to think about and reflect on in regardes to my writing.