I’ve been re-reading some of my favorite books on writing. The process reinforces the technical habits that make good writing and inspires the extra effort that makes great writing. Many of the technical rules are second nature to me, thanks to the Catholic nuns at St. Patrick’s and a burly, white-bearded professor at the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas. The former made me stand for hours at a chalkboard diagramming sentences. The latter – John Bremner – was known to make tender young coeds cry by bellowing “barbarism!” over a split infinitive or improper sequence of tenses in their copy.
William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s “The Elements of Style” never fails to refresh. Every time I read it, I’m amazed at how concise and yet immensely useful it is. It covers both the technical and the imaginative. Admittedly, some rules are simple copy editing mechanics, such as Rule #4: “Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause.” Others, while simple, have the power to improve anyone’s writing exponentially. Take Rule #17: “Omit needless words.” How simple. How powerful. How often violated. I feel like engraving it on my office wall, along with this brief exposition:
“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.”
Strunk & White also cover the more complex aspects of great writing – that certain voice, the turn of a phrase – that coax readers into following whatever path the writer is forging. The last chapter in particular, “An Approach to Style,” presents this description of the writing process:
“Writing is, for most, laboriously slow. The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the gird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in his blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, he must cultivate patience; he may have to work many covers to bring down one partridge.”
That single, simple paragraph inspires me to keep improving my craft. It reminds me that writing is more than a trade. It is an art.