Nikolas Thompson
Writing: Style, & Technology
February, 2003

The Art of Language
                  v.
            The Profitability of Efficiency

    Although humans have been writing for centuries - millenniums in fact - the artistry, usefulness, and effectiveness of the written word remains a current and important concept. This ever changing climate provides the context for a growing number of approaches and guides to writing. William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style was first published in 1959. Dianna Booher’s E-Writing: 21st-Century Tools for Effective Communication received its first publication in 2001. While Strunk and White’s Elements was constructed for college level English students, Booher’s E-Writing was built for the professional in a computer dependent workforce. Both text’s do share a purpose: to guide the reader towards better writing. What sets these books apart is the motivation behind this shared purpose. For Strunk and White, better writing is a matter of the pursuit of quality of a craft. Booher’s drive towards better writing is brought on by a desire for efficiency in a job setting. The opposition of motive behind these two texts is best illustrated by the different guidelines each book offers in the area of clarity.

    The Elements of Style, although not published until the late 1950’s, was originally compiled around the turn of the 19th century by William Strunk Jr. Strunk was an English professor at Cornell University, and his Elements was used to concisely clarify the vague, and often confusing, rules of english composition. He fit the mold (or should I say stereotype) of any 1900 English professor at a northeastern university: old, male, white, and stuffy. Perhaps Strunk’s co-writer, White, a student of his at Cornell and future novelist, describes him best in the book’s introduction.
               
                        "From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of
                    [Strunk], his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed
                    down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind
                    steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into strong
                    light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile
                    shuttling to and fro under a carefully edged mustache." (XV, my brackets)

    Strunk’s audience was his students. This group far less diverse than both the students at any of today’s universities, as well as the workforce that Diana Booher writes for. Strunk’s audience fits into a mold as well: white, male, socially refined, upper crust intellectuals, bred for prep school, Cornell, and Strunk’s upper-level English class. This was an audience trained to write for scholarly purposes. They wrote analytical essays, research papers, critical reviews, thesis's, and fiction. They wrote to reflect learning, to illustrate points, and to express ideas. They wrote for grades and for a diploma. In many ways, as students, it was their job to write. In essence Elements is a manual for english language usage; it is organized accordingly. Put together in a brief, 100 page volume, Elements devotes nearly three quarters of its scope to a rule-by-rule format, listing the dos and don’ts of english composition. The first section is the most basic. In Elementary Rules of Usage Strunk explains how to properly form possessive singular nouns, how to use commas in a series and before conjunctions, and he guides the reader away from evil comma splices. He explains proper use of colons and dashes, as well as subject verb agreement. In section two, Elementary Principles of Composition, Strunk gives the reader guidelines for effective writing. He instructs on using paragraphs as organizational units. He writes that the active voice should be used, as well as concrete, specific, language. According to section two, statements should be put in positive form, needless words should be omitted, related words should be kept together, and emphatic words should fall at the end of a sentence. Section three is devoted to Matters of form. Here, Strunk discusses usage of such items as colloquialisms, exclamations, headings, hyphens, and parentheses. He pins down proper use of quotations as well. Section four, Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, lists proper usage of, well, words and expressions that are commonly misused. Herein Strunk clarifies the often misunderstood differences between such words as aggravate and irritate, affect and effect, among and between, and further and farther.
    The final quarter of Elements, titled An Approach to Style, is contributed solely by E.B. White. It is in many ways different from the first three-quarters of Elements. This section attempts to define style. It is less rule-based than Strunk’s portion of Elements, and it is also less brief. Here, rather than offer rules of language and usage, White offers suggestions in great detail, giving the reader a general outline of approaches to writing that he or she may use to develop a manuscript’s style. His suggestions range from Write in a way that comes naturally and Do not overwrite, to Prefer the standard to the offbeat and Do not inject opinion. This closing chapter is a guide to concepts and ideas, and it is much less rigid than Strunk’s portion. Here White recognizes that rules are made to be broken, and that good writing comes not out of obedience to structure or efficiency, but out of skillful creativity within shifting boundaries. Writing with style in mind takes “patience” and “sincerity” (69).

    In contrast to the work of Strunk and White we have Diana Booher’s E-Writing: 21st-Century Tools for Effective Communication. E-Writing was written in light of the influx of computer based communication into the workforce. Specifically, the book is aimed at increasing clarity within electronic communication, or more specifically, e-mails. Most importantly, however, E-Writing is interested in increasing workplace efficiency. Booher is the CEO of Booher Consultants Inc., a training firm. She is middle age, white, and has authored 37 books. She is a professional communicator, and a business woman. When Booher is not writing she is traveling between corporate offices, consulting with administrators and their employees, and striving to increase the effectiveness of electronic communication. While the primary motivation behind Strunk and White’s Elements fell somewhere in between proper english language use and clearer scholastic and creative writing, Booher’s motivation comes from corporate values and bottom lines. Again, Strunk was an English professor and White was a novelist. Booher is a CEO. For example, on Elements’ back cover, praise is levied by The New Yorker. E-Writing toots its horn with back cover praise from the ENRON corporation. E-Writing is meant to grease the cogs of big business wheels. The more efficiently employees communicate, the less time that is wasted, and the more smoothly runs the corporate machine. Booher’s audience is older than Strunk and White’s. It is a professional audience, interested in better writing for the purpose of making and saving more money, rather than for increasing expressive ability. It was Strunk’s students’ job to write. For Booher’s clients, writing is only part of their job. Her audience is slightly more diverse than Strunk and White’s, as it would include a much larger female percentage. However, it would still be a predominately white group of readers that she is writing for.
    The book itself is substantially larger than Strunk and White’s pocket sized Elements. E-Writing weighs in at a hefty 375 plus pages. The book is divided into five parts. Part one, E-Mail Exchange, establishes the electronic focus of E-Writing. Part two offers a continuation as Booher addresses The E-Writing Culture. In fact, this section is aimed at attaining optimal efficiency through e-mail, and is actually one long chapter subtitled Counterproductive Communication Habits. Part three, Writing on Paper or Online, begins a theme of organization and editing that is continued throughout the rest of the book. Here Booher instructs a reader to consider audience when writing and to develop a first draft quickly. With Part four Booher continues to explain the steps and necessity behind efficiently molding a piece of writing. It is easily the longest section in the E-Writing. In just under 150 pages Booher explains steps in editing for content, layout, grammar, clarity, conciseness, and style. The fifth and final section of E-Writing focuses on technical issues such as applying variations to the MADE (TM) format, summarizing meeting minutes, and writing up proposals, procedures, and formal technical reports.

    To all three authors clarity is important. The emphasis they put on this rule, and it’s importance, marks a substantial deviation between texts. Strunk himself never refers to the concept of clarity directly. He does, however, guide the reader towards the importance of being clear during his Elementary Principles of Composition section. In rule 16 he instructs the reader to “use definite, specific, concrete language.” There is no surer way, he says, to arouse and hold a reader’s attention (21). Strunk furthers the notion of clarity indirectly in his 17th rule as well.
                       
                        Rule 17. Omit needless words.
                    Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no
                    unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences,
                    for the same reason a drawing should have no unnecessary
                    lines. (23)
       
    White addresses clarity directly in his Approach to Style section of Elements.

                        Rule 16. Be clear.
                    Clarity is not the prize in writing, nor is it always the principle
                    mark of good style. There are occasions when obscurity serves
                    a literary yearning, if not a literary purpose, and their are writers
                    whose mien is more overcast than clear. But since writing is
                    communication, clarity can only be a virtue...Even to a writer who
                    is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, ‘Be
                    obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!’ (79)

    This is essentially the gist of a rule that takes up less than a page in Elements. White is pushing for clarity, but he is recognizing the usefulness of ambiguity as a literary tool. Given a choice, both men would choose clarity over confusion. However, clarity receives no particular emphasis within Elements, and it is acknowledged that clarity can be purposefully manipulated. This is due to the literary motivation behind Elements. While clarity is important to both men, it is not more important than a loftier goal of literary merit. In Elements, clarity is simply another guideline, another flexible parameter set up to steer a writer toward a better execution of craft.
To Booher clarity is a more substantial rule than Strunk and White’s Approach to Style rule 16. It is more important than a loose guideline. As she puts it, “the issue should always be clarity” (230). To Booher, clarity is a matter of efficiency, and efficiency is money. To a business person, money is the loftiest goal of all.
                       
                        Clear writing demands clear thinking. Clarity, rather than gobbledy-
                    gook, is a true mark of intelligence. Policy manuals, instructional
                    materials, and research reports written at appropriate reading levels,
                    void of fog, could save businesses millions of dollars each year. (234)

    Booher devotes no less than 30 pages to clarity, her Rule 15. This doesn't take into account several instances throughout E-Writing where clarity is referred to much more indirectly. Within rule 15 Booher suggests “measuring readability,” by using formulas that measure the reading level of a piece of writing (230). According to Booher, writing at an eighth grade reading level is ideal (231). While her audience is older than Strunk and White’s college crowd, she is suggesting writing for readers at a middle school level. White compares the best instances of reading and writing to “steering by stars” (67). This idea runs in direct opposition to Booher's approach to reading and writing because it complicates efficiency. “Not only does foggy writing confuse and amuse,” she says, “but long sentences often camouflage important ideas” (233). She recommends using a mathematic method of writing instead of an interesting one.

                        To avoid buried ideas and unnecessary complexity, business
                    sentences should average no more than 15 to 20 words. Roughly,
                    that means two to two and a half lines of print. (233)
                 
    Booher’s 16th rule is dedicated to conciseness. Again, while Strunk focused on conciseness for a few brief pages, Booher spends roughly 15 pages hammering home the idea of clarity through conciseness. And while Strunk stresses conciseness for the purpose of arousing a reader’s interest, Booher’s stressing comes out of a desire to “save both writing time and reading time---both translate into money” (259).

    More people write today than ever before. The work of Booher, Strunk, and White is born of the same desire. They want everyone to write better. William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White approach good writing as an expressive, soulful, outpouring. They are lovers of the language, dedicated to its art and craft. They speak to writers. Diana Booher approaches good writing as a money saving tool. She is the product of the business world. Her book speaks to business people. Each text is valuable, as good writing is always a good idea. They are worlds apart, however, in the root of their desire improve writing.

Works Cited