Prado on Commercial Drive serves perfectly tart espressos. Problem is there is rarely parking. Last week, while driving by, I saw a spot. Because I was early, I took it.
While getting out of the car I saw in the window of the bookstore across the street a book I had not seen in years: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I purchased the book ($4.95) and flipped through it over coffee, reacquainting myself not only with its laws but its many fine examples.
The first “Rule of Usage” is “the possessive singular of nouns”:
“Charlie’s friend”
“Burns’s poems”
and my favorite:
“the witch’s malice”
The next is "exceptions," such as “ancient proper names,” like Jesus, written Jesus’.
So property first, religion second.
In God We Trust.
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A lovely book. From the "An Approach to Style" chapter: "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."
ReplyDeleteNot only do we have an adjective-industrial complex, but also a noun stuck in a ditch. It's grammatic imagism.
A recent challenge to the old logic of Strunk + White: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/01/28/book-review-how-to-write-a-sentence-and-how-to-read-one-by-stanley-fish/
ReplyDeleteHere's another:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/the-cult-of-the-sentence-take-that-strunk-white/article1912907/print/