Absolute Style

There are many things I believe I have learned from reading “Style: toward clarity and grace” by Joseph Williams, and “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White. Among these things are to use metaphors, have coherence, to write what comes naturally, to revise and rewrite, and to avoid fancy words.

First, write what comes naturally. I think this is important because it shows the writer’s personality. When a writer writes what comes naturally they use words and phrases unique to them. Or like when I wrote a story I titled “Guardian Angel” my teacher said I gave a sense of honesty and spirituality. I gave the sense of honesty just from my word choices, a lot of which I used in the first draft and they just stuck through the drafts because it is part of the story.

Coherence is also important. If what you are writing does not stick together the reader will reject it. For example, if I wrote an essay that just went from one sub-topic to the next, without connecting them to the main topic, readers wouldn’t accept it. They would be left wondering what I was talking about. If someone wrote an essay on gardening and started talking about the guy who experimented with peas and with dominant and recessive traits, the readers would be left wondering what the guy had to do with how knowing about him will help them keep their plants alive.

Thirdly, I think metaphors are important. They can help a writer, or anyone make a point. You don’t have to be a writer to use a metaphor. In middle school I was called to the counselor’s office because my teachers noticed I wasn’t as happy as I usually was. I have controlling parents, and I was having a fight over how controlling they were. I don’t remember the specifics of the argument anymore, but that isn’t important. When the counselor asked how I felt, I replied “I feel I’m a ball in a dryer.” I didn’t have to go any further, she immediately knew how I felt, or at least had a good idea. A ball in a dryer has no control over where it goes, which is how I felt, and I didn’t have to explain anymore after the metaphor. The counselor even commented she liked how I used the metaphor to explain how I felt. You can’t get away with not explaining a metaphor in writing. You don’t have a second chance to say something, or clarify if one reader doesn’t understand the metaphor. So in writing it’s better to explain the metaphor. With my ball in a dryer example, I would have explained how the ball has no control over where it goes, and how it is trapped in the dryer, and can’t get out until someone comes and says its okay and removes the ball from the dryer.

Last but not least, and I believe the most important thing, is to revise and rewrite. If in your writing you use a quote where the person uses a word like ain’t, you need to revise and change the word because ain’t isn’t a word. That and no one gets it right the first time. Most of us revise our writing while we write. We use a computer and we cut and paste, and use the backspace key before we’ve written the first draft from start to finish. Like this post, I have used the backspace key at least fifty times; I have also used the arrows to go back up to previous paragraphs and add things to my explanations to help make the explanations better. Revising is also important because it helps us catch our spelling errors, and even though we may use the spell check, it doesn’t catch where we have typed "of" instead of "if".

Discussion

What Ian brought up about Strunk and White saying you need to put your emotions on the back burner in his post titled Strunk and White’s EofS…Part Uno…, is also something I can relate to. I tend to write when feeling something other than okay. If I become angry I write, if I become ecstatic I write, but my writing tends to be a mirror of the emotion I am feeling at the moment I write it. So when doing a school paper, or something for a business it is important to put emotions on the backburner.

Also when Ian says that he was taught the bigger the words used in the paper, the better the better the paper became is another thing I can relate to. Teachers always encouraged me to use bigger words I had never used before, especially in middle school, in fact, for a few papers, one of our requirements were to use a given number of big words we had never used before. Blair brings up a point when talking about using big words in her post titled Style…from the yellow book. She says we make ourselves sound like idiots rather than educated people when we use the big words. I think this is part because we try so hard to use the big words we don’t necessarily use them correctly, and they just sound wrong in the sentence; even the uneducated that have no idea what the word means can tell when used incorrectly because of how wrong it sounds in the sentence. I remember in middle school when I was writing a myth, we had to use words we never used before. So I just chose a sentence, picked a word, and then used the Thesaurus to find a synonym. I looked up the words in the dictionary to try and use the right word, but I didn’t quite understand the definition of whatever words I was looking up. After putting the word I had chosen in the sentence the sentence just didn’t sound right, my instinct told me it was wrong, but I convinced myself that because I had looked up the definition and thought I understood the definition, that I had used it right. When I got the paper back, the teacher had a talk with me, and explained what the word meant; I hadn’t used the word right. My gut told me it was wrong even though my head said it was right. This shows that even someone who doesn’t understand the word can tell it is wrong. They may not know why it is wrong, like my gut couldn’t say why the word was wrong, but the people do know it is wrong, just as I knew the word I chose was wrong.

Ian also mentions the importance of writing having a rhythm, this I already knew but find to be very important. If writing has no rhythm then it discourages the reader from reading because nothing fits. When we get random bits of information we get bored. A piece of writing without rhythm is like a jerky car ride. You get frustrated in a jerky car ride because you prefer a smooth ride. The same goes with writing, if it has no rhythm, there is no smooth ride, it comes off as being all choppy. Everything should flow like a river. When we give writing that rhythm, then it has the flow, the smooth ride, we are looking for.

Metaphors for Writing Technology

Writing technology is a car on the technology train. When the computer was first invented it was seen as a faster way to compute numbers, which is how it got its name. Then technology advanced again and the computer became smaller, and people used it to write. Technology is always advancing, and the cars on the train are all the different technologies we have in our lives.

Writing technology is the body of a dancer. A dancer uses her body to let the music speak; writing technology is what a writer uses to let their soul speak. A writer’s soul is not easily heard, but it can be heard loud and clear through their writing. The writing is the soul talking, and the writing technology, such as the pen and paper, are the instruments used by the soul to talk. Where the body of the dancer is what music uses to talk.

Strunk & White vs. Williams

My first post on Strunk & White I said the two most helpful rules were to talk in the positive and to omit needless words. Strunk & White has to be brief with his explanations because it is a pocket book, Williams is more descriptive with why you should or shouldn’t do something because that is his goal.

In Strunk & White with rule 15 about using the positive, he doesn’t even use two pages to describe why it is a writer should do this and how to do it. This could be difficult for some to understand what to do and get the hang of changing things to the positive. One thing Williams does that Strunk & White does not, is gives a few phrases in the negative, and how to say them in the positive, like “not many” would be “few”, and “did not accept” would be “rejected”. This table is something that helped me because it directed my thinking rather than trying to change the whole sentence as I thought would have to be done from Strunk & White, I see it’s a small phrase that needs to be changed, and rewording a phrase is easier to do than a sentence.

Strunk & White says to omit needless words, Williams however, describes something called metadiscourse which is our thoughts like saying I believe, and says that these things are unnecessary and should be omitted. The other thing is all throughout Williams book, he talks about metadiscourse and what to omit, where Strunk & White takes less than two pages to talk about what should be omitted, and never touches on the I believe stuff. Plus Strunk & White only touches on redundancies and wordiness using “the reason why is that” should be “because” as an example of wordiness.

Another thing I mentioned in my first post was Strunk & White’s section on headings, and that I thought it most unhelpful. For one it talks mostly of margins, and a general format for sending a manuscript. The section doesn’t really talk about headings, and the section is only about a paragraph. When Williams talks about headings he talks about actual headings not margins for a manuscript. Williams talks about what a writer needs to know about headings. He talks about where to place a heading, what should be in a heading, says they help a writer when trying to organize their paper as well as helps the reader pick out the areas they would like to read.

Overall, Williams is better. Williams goes into more details on what is expected and clarifies what he is trying to say. But then Strunk & White is a good travel size, something you can take anywhere, that’s what Strunk & White wanted, he wanted something you could carry on the plane, or take with you in the park, and still be able to revise your writing. Williams wanted to be clear about what he was talking about and what he meant for a writer to revise, and why it is important for a writer to revise those things. I need things almost spelled out completely for me, so I prefer Williams over Strunk & White, but others may feel Strunk & White is all they need.