Re: Books on writing?

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

I'm with Patricia on this. I've read Stunk and White; it's fun. And,
when I edit friends' pieces I do what I call strunking. But that's
inspired by, rather than an application of, Strunk and White's dicta.
Mainly what *I* mean by strunking is prunining excess verbiage and
eliminating overly-complex sentence structures. Diehard
StunkandWhiters conflate overly-complex sentence structures with
complex sentence structures.
As I dimly remember there's a better book of the ilk by a guy at
Yale, but I'm forgetting the name.


On Oct 5, at 4:43 PM, Patricia M. Godfrey wrote:
> andy turnbull wrote:
> > a manual by Strunk and White (authors) is the standard. I don't
> > know the name of the book -- most people just refer to Strunk and
> > White.
> It's _The Elements of Style,_ and while it's useful (though it has
> an error or two, if you're a strict, analytic grammarian), it's not
> the be-all and end-all that some seem to think.
> > In Canada we use the Canadian Press Style Book to standardize
> > spellings and such, but that would not help in The States. On the
> > other hand, I'm sure there are AP and UPI style books.
> We need to distinguish: there are style books, such as the various
> Press style books, _Chicago_, and the out-of-date and out-of-print
> but enormously useful _Words into Type._ Then there are guides to
> grammar and usage, such as Fowler's _Modern English Usage_,
> Follett's _Modern American Usage,_ Bernstein's _The Careful
> Writer,_ and the really heavy grammars, such as Quirk, Jespersen,
> and the like. All of these are useful for writers, and essential
> for editors.
> What Valmond Ghyoot is talking about, however, is another class of
> work: how-to-write books, and I'm going to go out on a curmudgeonly
> limb and say they're a waste of time and money. To write, you need
> (IMHO) three things: a knowledge of your subject matter; an
> organizational plan for how you want to tackle it; and a knowledge
> of the language in which you are going to write. If you're
> targeting a specific audience, you should probably know something
> about that audience (e.g., you explain a procedure on a computer
> one way to a techie, another to a clueless dweeb).
> I'm talking about factual, expository writing. Creative stuff is
> another matter, and I suspect creative writers are born, not made.
> --
> Patricia M. Godfrey
> PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx




David Auerbach
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Box 8103
NCSU
Raleigh, NC 27695-8103