Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
He must have read William Strunk's book "The Elements of Style." Point #3 is right out of his book. i.e. 'omit needless words.'
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The above rules were taken from Orwell's 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," which preceded Strunk and White's popular version of
Elements of Style by thirteen years. The original version by Strunk alone was published privately in 1918 to be used at Cornell, the university where he taught, but I question whether a British writer like Orwell needed to track down such a rarity to reinforce ideas of style which his writing already exhibited. If he were interested in an American's thoughts on style, he'd be more likely to find a book like Ambrose Bierce's
Write It Right. And since Orwell was English, he was already familiar with Fowler's
Modern English Usage, which extols the virtues of simplicity, brevity and unpretentious diction.
Besides which, the Strunk and White is good but not definitive. I've found other books more helpful ultimately, especially
The Reader over Your Shoulder, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (if only it were available as an e-book!), and Edward Corbett's
Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, as well as -- I say this hesitantly --
The Chicago Manual of Style. And though I detest certain of his assumptions, Fowler's book on usage and its updated versions have been helpful as well.
Crich:
I realize this is OT, but you might be amused by Derek Pell's parody of
Elements of Style, in which he takes Roland Barthes' comment on the writings of the Marquis De Sade literally: "His pornographic messages are so pure they might be used as grammatical models." In fact the entirety of Pell's parody consists of examples taken from Sade to illustrate (along with several ridiculous collages) the rules in Strunk and White. There's also "A Chapter on Writhing."
The parody was published as a separate book but is also available from FC2 in Pell's collection,
X Texts, which also features two other hilarious pieces: The opening of
Breakfast at Tiffany's as written by William Burroughs and a parody of Nabokov which concerns the main character's lust for an extremely old Lolita.