People will despise me for it but I’ll just come out and say it. What saved my writing from being a pompous Germanic mess was the good old Strunk and White. It’s fashionable to hate on Strunk and White but I read that tiny volume twice and now I’m the author of the very moderately Germanic posts you all enjoy.
Strunk and White give examples of sentences, and for every single one I’d exclaim, “Yes! That sounds beautiful!” And then Strunk and White would explain why it’s a horrid, ugly sentence.
Just to give an example (which Strunk and White would tell me to reduce to “Example:” but then nobody is perfect):
I was totally the “he is a man who” (or even worse, “I’m a person who”) type of writer. But I’m mostly cured. OK, partially cured.
Strunk and White have become less popular because their rules hurt the feelings of the wordy. Or the grammatically challenged. But they are great.
To practice, I recommend writing a 500-word piece on any subject. The last movie you watched, your favorite podcast. And then try to edit it down for maximum clarity.
Another great exercise is to summarize in one sentence an episode of a TV series or a book you read. Write the sentence in Word and see what the grammar check flags as possible problems. Do that at least once daily.
In short, clarity, brevity, and a lot of practice.
Clarissa's Blog 
What? People hate on Strunk and White?
I loved White’s personal essays, back in the day, as well as Elements of Style. Time for a reread, maybe.
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We are not supposed to believe that there’s good and bad writing. Triple negatives are special, indigenous wisdom or something.
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People don’t like Strunk & White due to pure contrarianism (if something is that popular, there must be something wrong with it, like McDonald’s burgers) and also they want to signal that they’re advanced writers who are above such advice. Which may be true, but they forget that the book is not meant for them. Most beginning writers would like some clear rules to follow and S&W does an excellent job of it.
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“Strunk & White”
I think it’s useful in some contexts and has some very valuable guidlelines, especially for beginning or non-native writers. I just don’t like it when people treat it like a religious text or cling to bad passages or ugly sentences with “But Strunk & White….!”
The general idea of getting rid of unnecessary words is indeed good. But… I tend to think of writing as an extension of speech and euphony and sentence rhythm are important (not everybody shares this idea of course). Just the other day someone questioned my use of ‘thusly’ instead of ‘thus’… for me, there needed to be two syllables in that slot and using ‘thus’ would have thrown the rhythm off.
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There you go, adding *context*.
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“There you go, adding *context*.”
Damn my nuanced hide!
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on the subject of rhymeswriters have told you many timesthe necessity of form is no conceitfor the readers who would like to meetyour prose in the middle of those linesonly to be defeated 🙂
Well, at least it’s not Turabian.
If it were Turabian, I’d burn an Oregon flag at the footstep of your blog. 🙂
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…WTF is with this comment plug-in?
Can’t even copy and paste from a less laggy thing (like any text editor)?
[goes looking for a California flag and some firelighters to register my protest with Big Software] :-)
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If fluency is the issue, I recommend to my students to watch sitcoms (something like Friends) and to read magazines found in the checkout lines of a grocery store. Unlike random web materials, the magazines will expose the person to decently proofread and punctuated modern idiomatic English, which isn’t exactly taught in the classroom. The shows can educate on pronunciation and cadence of conversational English.
As for getting better at writing, people must read; there is no way around it. In order to write good research papers, one must read plenty of papers; academic writing is a genre unto itself. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with reading fun, accessible fiction like Stephen King or James Patterson or whoever the person likes in whatever genre they enjoy.
In addition to Strunk and White, I also recommend Stephen King’s On Writing, which is part memoir, part writing manual, and reads like a fast-paced thriller.
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I never read King’s On Writing but it sounds very interesting. Thank you for the recommendation!
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