The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

the starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader

Strunk was born in 1869, and today’s writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who developed his sense of style before the invention of the telephone (let alone the Internet), before the advent of modern linguistics and cognitive science, before the wave of informalization that swept the world in the second half of the twentieth century.

The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it. That is because the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view.

They write as if they have something important to say. But no, that doesn’t capture it. They write as if they have something important to show. And that, we shall see, is a key ingredient in the sense of style.

A famous piece of advice from this school crosses the line from the grim to the infanticidal: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

Surveys have shown that college students are writing more than their counterparts in earlier generations did, and that they make no more errors per page of writing.

power to communicate the links between ideas

Finally, an awareness of syntax can help you avoid ambiguous, confusing, and convoluted sentences.

Because determiners and modifiers are not interchangeable.

this confuses the grammatical category “adjective” with the grammatical function “modifier.”