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"Forget grammar and think about potatoes."
-Gertrude Stein
In 1918, Cornell professor, William Strunk, Jr., self-published The Elements of Style. In the introduction, his student, E.B. White, boasted that the 70-page primer fit "the rules and principles on the head of a pin," concisely cataloging stylistic high crimes and grammatical misdemeanors. The Stuart Little author went on to reveal the purpose of what he called his teacher's Parvus Opum, or "Little Book": to rescue the writer "floundering in the swamp... delivering his man up on dry ground... or at least throw him a rope."
Bestselling novelist, Stephen King, concluded in the introduction to his 2000 title, On Writing, that "The Little Book" contained, "little or no detectable bullshit," and that his own title was also short "because most books about writing are filled with bullshit."
Many agreed. The Elements of Style became a pioneering classic, apparently delivering drowning scriveners to dry ground. With the serial adjectives he spurned, White concluded, "Longer, lower textbooks are in use nowadays, I daresay - books with upswept tail fins and automatic verbs." But - indulging himself in not one, but two, adverbs - he insisted that none "come to the point as quickly and illuminate it as amusingly."
Countless other lines have been tossed into the high seas of literature since the Elements. Today's writer, now with more ropes on him than Gulliver under the Lilliputians, must decide which are lifesavers and which are nooses.
University of Edinburgh English chair, Geoffrey K. Pullum1, asserts that the latter outnumber the former in Strunk and White's style and usage primer. "Both authors were grammatical incompetents," he writes. "The book's contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, as if the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don't apply to them."
Even so, most would agree with King that the Little Book's stylistic rules, if not the usage rules, are bulletproof and timeless.
But does Shakespeare, Professor Strunk's exemplar, flaunt the fact that the professor's law didn't apply to him either?
Don't overstate, overexplain, or pontificate.
Omit needless words: be clear and concise.
Don't use a twenty dollar word when a ten center will do.
Don't affect a breezy manner.
Some might say that, in their bloviations, Hamlet, Othello,...