Title: The elements of style (illustrated 4th edition)
Author: Strunk, White and Kalman (illustrations)
Description: Style guide originally written to encourage good essay-writing in American university students. Contains reminders of good grammar and usage (for American English), guidelines for good form in writing, and a section on developing style.
Review: Packs more punch in a smaller space than any writing guide I've read - and entertaining too. Sample gems:
"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."
"Rather, very, little, pretty - these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words."
This has been my desk-top writing guide for years; it stays fresh and relevant even after being re-read till the spine breaks. The illustrations are slightly odd - pretty pastel colours which lull you into believing the book to be similarly wishy-washy. It's anything but.
Why it's on my desk: It's not specifically aimed at web writing, but it turns out that web writing and clear, high-quality essay writing have a lot in common. "Avoid fancy words", "Be clear!", "Put yourself in the background": all of these and more apply to writing for the web just as much as they do to writing an essay.
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2 comments:
Good post. I don't normally go for too many rules, but simple rules when writing must be a sensible starting point to ensure a basic level of readability, particularly when that writing is done under pressure or to a deadline.
Have you come across the readability testing tool @ http://www.read-able.com/ ? I'd be intrested to know what you think...
Well, according to read-able.com my blog can be understood by 13-14 year-olds. Which is good news for all those GCSE students doing web content management on the side :-).
I suppose like any tool you need to know what you're using it for. I'm tempted to run our Student Life pages through it and see what the differences are...
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