The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B.

White, has been widely celebrated as one of the masterworks of English usage. Time magazine listed it as one of the one hundred most influential books written in English since 1923. More than ten million copies of the slim little volume that elucidates good usage, proper composition, and correct form have been sold over the course of the last half-century. Shred it. Shred it, that is, after youve read it once so that you know what not to do in your writing. Then, buy a copy of Arthur Plotniks Spunk and Bite: A Writers Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style. Arthur who? Why should you attend to the advice of someone youve never heard of? Well, who had heard of Strunk, a Cornell University English professor, a hundred years ago? And though E. B. White was a famed New Yorker staff writer, as well as author of beloved childrens novels like Charlottes Web, he wasnt considered an authority on language when he was commissioned to update his former teachers slight handbook in 1959. If there is any justice in the world, Plotnik will be as much of a household name in fifty years as Strunk & White are now and with more justification. Why the adulation? Plotnik, author of several acclaimed books on writing, offers Spunk and Bite as a refreshing alternative to the dry, rigid edicts of the book known informally as Strunk & White. The latter work, he argues authoritatively, stifles creativity and results in sterile prose. In seven example-laden sections, he offers liberating advice in chapters with such titles as Joltingly Fresh Adverbs, The Punchy Trope, How to Loot a Thesaurus, Intensifiers for the Feeble, A License. To Fragment. Sentences, Magic in the Names of Things, and Edge: Writing at the Nervy Limits. Over and over again, Plotnik begs to differ with The Elements of Style, urging writers to know the Strunk & White rules only so they can break them. No anarchist he, however the advice is generally grounded in a more liberal reading of the principles of English grammar and usage and in the understanding that some of the great literature of our language, from Shakespeare to Joyce to well, he lauds the style of Martin Amis, Bill Bryson, Jonathan Franzen, Mark Leyner, E. Annie Proulx, Salman Rushdie, and others have done very well without adhering to Strunk & Whites prissy precepts. I cant wholeheartedly embrace Plotniks prescriptions; his chapter on alternatives to using quotation marks to signal dialogue, for example, makes me cringe, and he suggests (mysteriously citing support of other recent writing guides) that a comma can precede the last item in a sentence in which semicolons separate other items in the series. (His example: She tried switching computers; she wrote by hand; she dictated to a recorder, her old one from work, and she prayed to her muse.) That aberrant final comma, however, renders an otherwise acceptable sentence grotesque.

Theres also an occasional misstep in his advice: He suggests diminishing what he considers an awkward subject-verb delay in Ibrahim could not, in spite of all his training, knowing that the platoon depended on him, even with the armed and hated enemy in his crosshairs, fire by revising the sentence to Ibrahim could not fire, in spite of all his training, knowing that the platoon depended on him, even with the armed and hated enemy in his crosshairs. But this fix squanders the sentences tension, and it is the bisection of the verb phrase could not fire, not the delay between Ibrahim could not and fire, that mars the sentence. A better revision, one that aptly spotlights the stair-step intensification of the increasingly longer modifying phrases, is Ibrahim, in spite of all his training, knowing that the platoon depended on him, even with the armed and hated enemy in his crosshairs, could not fire. Visitors to this site have similarly improved on my suggested revisions of not-quite-right writing, however, and this quibble and the preceding ones serve only to point out that Plotnik isnt perfect. But The Elements of Style is out of style, and Spunk and Bite is an engaging antidote to Strunk and Whites black-and-white bludgeoning a rainbow of writing recipes.