Comparing Strunk and White

The order of information is one of the most obvious differences between Williams’s Style and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Strunk and White appear to begin almost arbitrarily, examining rules of punctuation. Williams begins with outlining the causes of bad writing, and defines vocabulary that must be understood to examine more complex concepts further in the book. I like that Williams gives some historical information about writing, because it is important to know the causes before trying to apply solutions.
I can definitely see a difference in audiences between Strunk and White, and Williams. Williams provides a more comprehensive look at the linguistic level. He does a better job of demonstrating through examples and explaining the reasons for following rules. Strunk and White designed The Elements of Style as a reference for students of beginning composition, but the book tries to address concepts that require some knowledge of linguistics. For example Strunk and White use the words “parallel construction,” but they don’t demonstrate how parallel construction occurs. On the other hand, Williams uses bold letters to emphasize where the rule violation takes place.
One of the rules from Strunk and White that I’ve tried to apply to my own writing is to “omit needless words,” but I thought Willaim’s book gave more precise details about how to eliminate wordiness. An example of this is on page 122 in the section about phrases that can be compressed into single words. Wiiliams helps us realize that we can limit metadiscourse, cut out words that state what can be implied, and avoid belaboring the obvious. All of these terms are also defined, in depth, in the book.
A major difference between the two style books is the length of discussion about each topic. Strunk and White have a rule that says “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end,” but they don’t define emphatic or explain why it should to at the end. They simply say, “”The proper place…” on page 32, but they don’t tell the writer how to decide what information should be prominent. In contrast, Williams explains what stress is and how it is a natural part of our speech patterns. He also explains that old information should go at the beginning of a sentence, to add to the overall flow of the document.
Interestingly, Williams also shows some examples where words should be added to improve clarity by running a thread through the sentence. An example of when to do this is on page 149 where Williams writes that it is sometimes good to repeat a word so that the reader knows what the subject of the sentence is, throughout. This is especially important in long sentences. I found that section particularly helpful, including the section about pronoun reference because I’ve never known how to handle sentences with multiple subjects. The long sentence section is an important difference between the books because Strunk and White never mention anything about stylistic variance, and it seems lik individual voice can easily be lost by trying to abide by all the rules of style. Williams makes it more clear that concise doesn’t always mean short, but instead means to the point. Every sentence doesn’t have to be under 20 words.
Overall, I learned much more from the Williams book than from Strunk and White. Williams organized the information well, and it is easy to navigate Style as a reference, even though it is a much longer book than The Elements of Style.