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writing things down…

Happy Birthday, Strunk & White; Down with Strunk & White

So I won’t be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst.

Geoffrey K. Pullum

1 Comment»

  silverseason wrote @

So who has angst? Simplify. Avoid the passive voice (that great disguiser of who did what to whom), use fewer words. If you can remove the word from the sentence without changing its meaning – or perhaps even improving clarity – take it out. I just posted an entry in my Silver Threads blog http://silverseason.wordpress.com/ about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. A little Strunk and White would have been very good for him.


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