Updated: 11/17/02; 1:23:35 AM.
Rough Days for a Gentil Knight
The Radio weblog of Oblivious Allan Baruz.
“He was a verray parfit gentil knight.” —Chaucer
        

Sunday 4 August 2002
categories: Hostage to Crap

I don’t know what is behind the fetish so many writers have for Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. (Find references)

(Anecdote) Joe Marques (of Winter Hours) (parapraxis: Winter Horus, didn't Horus die in the winter?) and the Chinese student and his insistence (as an English tutor).

My preference is The Golden Book on Writing, previously published as On Writing but I think Golden published it later under that title. Unfortunately, its first publication at Dartmouth falls on the 1923 cusp of copyright holdings that is in such doubt. Additional material was published later.

http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm

Where the emphasis in the Strunk portion of the work is on Hemingwayesque brevity and clarity, the emphasis of the Dartmouth book is an elegant balance of sentence suiting the mood of the piece. Anyone who has read this little corner of the Internet probably knows of my preference for the discursive. Never was too fond of Hemingway.

Another thing I like is that it is written as an organized rhetorical composition, not as a list. Rather, it is a numbered list, but the two editions I have used have committed the numbered headings to the margin, making these elements less obtrusive.

All in all, S&W always puts me in mind of the business letter, though it is On Writing that ever specifically deals with business writing, and the letter, as writing form.
3:27:48 PM    comment []


I had some questions about Dave Winer’s piece that I tried to answer for myself.
12:26:40 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2002 Richard Allan Baruz.
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