The Elements of Style: a review, reflection, and ramblings
My entire life I have been a terrible, no good, rambling, mess of a writer. I am told I write as a toddler would speak or a pianist would play the violin, you can make out the sounds, sometimes the words, but it takes an excavator to get to the meaning.
I have chosen to improve this skill out of both frustrations with my writing and personal desire to improve myself. My first step in this journey is reading a book my mother gave me just before university, a not so subtle hint that I should improve my writing, a book called The Elements of Style by William Strunk. Better late than never I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
External factors also contributed to my desire to improve my writing. In a remote first world, a majority of communication is done through written text. The sheer amount of written communication can be suffocating. Through analysis of my conversations with coworkers it has become apparent that a majority of the time the text itself could be both more concise and more clear. This would reduce both the size of the message but also the number of messages as there would be less back and forth on the meaning.
I have also realized the importance of high quality documentation. So much of my work is determining what to do and how to do it, and though we like to pretend these steps are not related, they are. High quality documentation allows me to iterate through this process quickly and more importantly lack of documentation causes my work to slow while I spend time figuring out how things work. Due to this I have decided being able to write high quality documentation is an essential skill for developers. An important factor in being able to write quality documentation is concise and clear writing skills.
In this blog post I hope to provide the reader with the values I have derived from the book as well as reflect upon some of the parallels between writing and developing software.
Review
The Elements of Style is divided into 5 chapters. I summarize each chapter and allude to my thoughts on the chapter below.
The Elementary Rules of Usage, better-called Grammar you forgot after high school and how to actually use a semicolon. The chapter covers common grammatical mistakes found in writing and the stylistic opinions of the author, William Strunk.
Elementary Principles of Composition, better-called Be terse, bold, and structured. The chapter covers the use of the active voice, structuring your writing, expressing similar ideas in similar forms, and omitting unnecessary text.
A Few Matters of Form, better-called Page layout and formatting you will ignore and use your word processors default. The chapter covers the usage of references in text, how to style headings, titles, and the page itself. If writing an academic paper or formal document, it is unlikely you will get to decide on these aspects of your writing.
Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, better-called You are illiterate and you don’t use words correctly but neither does anyone else. The chapter covers … actually the original title may provide better clarity on the contents of the chapter.
An Approach to Style, better-called The reason you bought the book. The chapter provides a set of reminders and techniques to refer to when writing. Some of these tips include: reread and rewrite, avoid figures of speech, be clear, and when struggling to reword a sentence restart that sentence from scratch.
The value of this book shows when working through the examples for each teaching. The teaching itself often seemed obvious, something that I would do subconsciously when writing. However, when reading the text which didn’t apply the teaching I found writing similar to mine. After reading the text with the teaching applied it would become apparent that the original text could be both more concise and clear and that most people fail to follow the teaching.
Consider these examples from the teaching Omit needless words
| Teaching not applied | Teaching applied |
|---|---|
| The question as to whether | Whether |
| There is no doubt but that | No doubt |
| Used for fuel purposes | Used for fuel |
| This is a subject that | This subject |
| The reason why is that | Because |
| In spite of the fact that | Though |
The book has another valuable property, it is small. Due to this and the detailed table of contents at the beginning of the book I am able to keep it nearby and reference it when necessary. Often my process is to write an atrocious sentence which says everything I want and then look for teachings from the book to rewrite it. Along with Grammarly, it is an essential tool for me when writing.
Due to both of these values I believe the book is worth a read for people in a similar position to me in terms of writing capabilities and desire to improve. It is unlikely the reader will find the entirety of the book useful but with a highlighter in hand and a day to read you may be able to find some useful tips.
Favorite Teachings
- Make the paragraph the unit of composition
- Use the active voice
- Put statements in positive form
- Use definite, specific, concrete language
- Omit needless words
- Express coordinate ideas in similar form
- Write in a way that comes naturally
- Work from a suitable design
- Revise and rewrite
- Do not overwrite
- Do not overstate
- Be clear
- Use figures of speech sparingly
- Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity
Reflection
I found the parallels between how we as developers write software and how the book suggests writing very interesting.
When developing software, getting something, even if not production quality, working end to end is better than getting a single component working to perfection. This is because unknowns show themselves when developing end to end which would not normally be found within a singular component. Similarly, developing a structure for your writing provides clarity and focus to your writing as well as points out the flaws in the understanding of what you are going to write. For example, while writing this blog post it became apparent that I wanted to write about multiple aspects of my experience with this book (the broken down sections). By taking the time to structure my thoughts and notes on the book I have stopped this post from being a set of incoherent ramblings, though ramblings non the less. Rereading and rewriting text is similar to debugging and refactoring software. Problems found while getting end-to-end working are able to be analyzed (read again) and refactored (rewritten). An alternative perspective is that in both software and writing we don’t know what the software is going to do or what the writing is going to sound like until we write and reread it (debug it).
Writing for the sake of writing is a common trap in both software and writing. When developing software it is easy to solve small problems or write extra code because of the allure of doing so. This bloat is viewed when unnecessary abstractions are added to software under the guise of future-proofing or paying down technical debt. In writing, this bloat occurs when adding sentences for the sake of it and the sentences do not add any value to the text. The author addresses this through their warning against the Seductive click and flow of a word processor and “Writing a few unnecessary words or even a whole passage just to experience the pleasure of running your fingers over the keyboard”. The result of this trap is software and writing which takes away from the reader's ability to understand the content.
Ramblings
It would be interesting to see these reminders and rules turn into a program. The rewriting of malformed writing is difficult at times, the examples given in the book lead me to believe the common case is easily rewritable by a sufficiently trained AI or engine. I imagine a Strunk-inspired Grammarly would provide clarity and terseness to my writing.
Oh and one last thing, inflammable and flammable should not mean the same thing. I will die on this hill.