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| | The Chronicle: 8/13/2004: Style: a Pleasure for the Reader, or the Writer? |
 | | The paragon is The Elements of Style, which grew out of a self-published pamphlet that William Strunk, an English professor at Cornell in the early decades of the last century, handed out to his students, one of whom was E.B. White. |
 | | That is, they and their followers view style as an absence of faults -- an elimination of all grammatical mistakes and solecisms, of breeziness, opinions, clichés, jargon, mixed metaphors, passive-voice constructions, wordiness, and so on. |
 | | White understood that The Elements of Style offered a particular perspective on writing style and did not (as he wrote in the Introduction) "pretend to survey the whole field." Moreover, his own style, although outwardly plain, simple, orderly, and sincere, was also idiosyncratic, opinionated, and unmistakable. |
| chronicle.com /free/v50/i49/49b01601.htm (2625 words) |
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