[from the stabenow.com vaults, May 17, 2010]
Dana sez, “The perfect gift to give the wannabe writer in your family.”
There are a lot of obvious answers, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a desk encyclopedia.
But if I were stranded on a desert island, with pen and paper to hand, the one essential guide I would have to have with me would be Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.
The original edition was written as a textbook by English professor Will Strunk, Jr. It was revived, added to and published by one of his students, E.B. White, and has yet to go out of print. White, you will remember, is also the author of Charlotte’s Web, as well as The Letters of E.B. White, the wisest and wittiest collection of not-so-private correspondence ever bound between two covers. (One example: “I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.”)
Part of the delight of this book [Grammar? Delightful? Am I kidding you? No.] lies [lays?] in its [no apostrophe] examples, as here:
“Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very cheap” demonstrating the incorrect usage of participial phrase and subject.
I don’t know about you, but I always buy houses when I’m in a dilapidated condition myself.
Chapter 4, “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused,” is my first stop when I stub my toe on something everyone says, so it has to be right. Right? Wrong. Strunk and White are united in the less is more view of style. Don’t pad, don’t label, don’t invent verbs by adding -ize to a noun, however tempting it may be. That way lies [lays?] abomination.
Make that, the one thing with which I’d like to be buried.