THE ICE PICK

The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. 4th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1999. Includes index. ISBN 0-205-31342-6. $14.95 hbk, $7.95 pbk.

Do you have trouble with apostrophes or commas or wonder when numbers should be spelled out?

While it may be true that you can never be too rich or too thin; it is certainly true that you can never have too many dictionaries or too many grammar books (or cookbooks, but that is another story). This is because none of the dictionaries--even the so-called unabridged ones--can contain every possible word, nor can any of the grammar books foresee every possible need. Therefore, what you can’t find in one book, you may find in another.

However, if you can have only one grammar book, this is the one to have. Composed of "seven rules of usage, eleven principles of composition, a few matters of form, and a list of words and expressions commonly misused," Strunk and White, as it is commonly known, is the classic work on the fundamentals of plain English style, usage, punctuation, and grammar.

Relatively inexpensive, at $7.95 for the paperback edition, almost everyone can afford to purchase this excellent book. And in less than one hundred pages, it covers the basics with accuracy, clarity, brevity, and wit, which makes the rules easy to understand and to remember.

For example, in the discussion on the use of shall and will, Strunk writes, "In formal writing, the future tense requires shall for the first person, will for the second and third. The formula to express the speaker’s belief regarding his future action or state is I shall; I will expresses his determination or his consent. A swimmer in distress cries, ‘I shall drown; no one will save me!’ A suicide puts it the other way: ‘I will drown; no one shall save me!’ In relaxed speech, however, the words shall and will are seldom used precisely; our ear guides us or fails to guide us, as the case may be, and we are quite likely to drown when we want to survive and survive when we want to drown."

Even if you may not normally care about "shall" and "will," if you are writing dialog and your characters are highly educated or of an upper class, you should be able to use the words correctly.

Quick to acknowledge the fallacy of inflexibility and the danger of doctrine, Professor Strunk says, "It is an old observation, that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules."

The newer editions have an excellent index, the lack of which was my only complaint about the earlier versions of the book.

It is the sort of book you can quickly read through, and yet find some bit of gold in it every time you re-read it. And if you master Strunk and White and faithfully adhere to their tenets, you cannot go wrong.

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

And that is good advice for all of us.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, June 1999. Reprinted in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, July 2005.}