Prompt 5

Collin Bertram
Eng 328: Writing, Style, and Technology
Professor Krause
July-19-2004
Prompt 5
Writing is a very large part of my life. As a student at EMU I am assigned many things. My teachers tell me to read a lot, they tell me to write a lot. For a long time I thought I knew a lot about writing. I thought I knew what good writing looked like; I thought I could tell if writing was poor. If a text was difficult for me I thought that the writer was really good at what he did and his work was too complicated for me. I never stopped to think about the importance of whether or not the text was understandable. I never cared to look into the technicalities of writing, to ask the question, “What makes this text easy to understand and this one impossible to understand?” The A’s I received on my papers convinced me that I was a mater writer. Looking back, the stuff I wrote is too much work for the reader. But I have learned that there is a lot left for me to find out about. The two books I was assigned for class, The Elements of Style (Strunk and White) and Style Toward Clarity and Grace (Williams), changed the way I look at writing.
Strunk and White’s book, The Elements of Style, amazed me when I read it for the first time. I had no idea that less could ever be better. You see, I am the kind of person that dumps a whole bag of coffee grounds into a filter for one cup of coffee. When I do something, I do it extensively. With writing, I have convinced myself that the more big words, the longer the sentence, the more flowery the language, the better the writing. Why? -I don’t know. No one has ever directly taught me that. But now, some one has taught me not to do that. Strunk and White did me a huge favor when they told me to, “Omit needless Words”, “Use the Active Voice”, “Do not construct awkward Adverbs”, “Avoid Fancy Words.” This is a huge favor because I thought people who were authorities on writing wanted all of those things that Elements of style told me to get rid of. I believed the opposite about writing, or at least I performed the opposite while writing. However, Williams’ book was an even greater experience.
Style Toward Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M. Williams had a larger impact on me than The Elements of Style. Williams made sense of all that I had so recently thought was writing gospel. He took everything I didn’t like about Strunk and White and said the opposite, he took everything I liked about Strunk and White and just explained it better; everything about how to be more clear, everything about writing less and being concise. Williams made a huge fire out of the spark I saw from Strunk and White. He did a lot they didn’t’ do. He said that a lot of their orders were just folklore. He said real writers don’t care about things like beginning a sentence with because or and, they don’t care about the use of this or which with reference to a whole clause, or split infinitives. Reading selections that proved these rules to be nothing but folklore was a load off of my mind. Strunk and White had a nice and pretty idealized fantasy world; but I read a lot, and the novels I read do not concur. Williams must have been reading real authors while Strunk and White were complaining about how stupid their students were. And I prefer to take advice from people I can respect.
These two books have revolutionized my writing. They have changed the way I look at writing. When I read something now I know why it makes sense, or I know that a bad writer is just some one who writes stuff that you can’t understand. Complicated ideas don’t have to be turgid. I don’t have to be turgid to be a good writer.