Four books have made me a far better writer. I recommend folks read them all:<p>- Strunk & White<p>- On Writing Well<p>- Style: Towards Clarity and Grace<p>- Clear and Simple as the Truth<p>I read them in that order and each felt like a revelation.
I read “On Writing Well” recently and really enjoyed it. The author cites “Elements” frequently.<p><a href="https://ia800308.us.archive.org/31/items/OnWritingWell/on-writing-well.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ia800308.us.archive.org/31/items/OnWritingWell/on-wr...</a>
This is in the open, and is available in all formats (PDF, HTML, E-Readers, etc.) at Gutenberg - <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134</a>
This book came up recently, and I learned that “White” is E.B. White. Author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart little. I particularly enjoyed the image of Charlotte teaching grammar…
For covering the subject of writing, the typesetting of the PDF is remarkably poor. The mix of serif and sans serif, the font sizes don't match the structure of the document, and enumerations have inconsistent indentation - to point out just a few blemishes.
I got this on Kindle as preparation for starting my first novel.<p>I found it interesting and informative, even though most of the rules in it I reckon are better followed via acquired intuition (i.e. reading a lot) than studying them.
As always, I recommend <i>Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace</i> by Williams and Colomb. Get an old copy if you don’t want to pay for a new edition.<p>Elements of Style is a classic but there are better alternatives.
Nothing but a pile of linguistic ignorance and the authors’ weird peeves. See <a href="http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.pdf</a>