While The Elements of Style has served as the standard in advanced English composition and fine writing studies for decades, the information age and its electronic take-over have left many professionals lacking a practical reference that applied to everyday business and a modern audience.
The argument can certainly be made that it would be counter-productive to revise such a carefully planned and knowledge-packed book, but some newer guides, specifically Dianna Booher’s E-Writing, almost scoff at traditional rhetoric and offers a more applicable tool for business professionals of the new millennium. While there are numerous examples within that could illustrate the contrast between the works, perhaps the best microcosm of their differences can be realized while focusing on the intended readers.
Different Intended Audiences
It could easily be said that the two guides are really not in the same league, one geared toward academia and the other toward the business world, but some comparisons can be made. To illustrate the difference in the motivation behind the two books, one needs only to look at the dates. Strunk originally published The Elements of Style in the 1930s. At that time, it was geared towards students, like today, but of course the vast majority of students then were white males.
E-Writing trumpets the fact that it is time for change; first published in 2001, it advertises that it contains “21st century tools for effective communication” right on the cover. Booher leaves behind the muddled collection of rules and focuses on methods and techniques that promote highly usable, appealing, and crystal-clear writing.
This leads some fundamentalists to declare a “dumbing down” of America. This argument has persisted for years, and with just a glance within the two books in question will force realization that Booher chooses functionality over stodgy correctness, not holding a candle to the scholarly qualities of her academic predecessors.
Usability and Applicability for the Reader
As a modern reader, one cannot help but relate more to Booher. Her book can be absorbed in about a sitting, while The Elements of Style can take an educated person days to plod through, and even years to effectively master. Reading through it casts numerous doubts on one’s own work, with the reader constantly spotting errors that they have made occasionally or likely often. Booher’s advice somehow seems more comfortable and welcoming.
Guidelines of The Elements of Style do, however, allow a writer a bit more expression than those of E-Writing. Booher tends to command a certain template to standardize messages and correspondences while Strunk and White lay out the groundwork of rules and regulations, urging the writer to creatively make composition correctly flow on the page. For instance, the MADE format (which is even trademarked) is presented by Booher on page 67 as the absolute and "most effective method" to compose a message.
The MADE acronym stands for:
- Message
- Action
- Details
- Evidence
According to Booher, the meanings of these words reflect the classical meanings in the E-Writing context. She does encourage changes to the basic format, like considering the audience and anticipating possible reactions.
The MADE format may work very well, but many writers, especially those who are by nature more creative, may not comfortably adhere to such rigid guidelines. Strunk and White present no such template, instead suggesting, on page 15 of the latest edition, “A basic structural design underlies every kind of writing.” They offer limited guidance in regards to setting up certain styles of writing, but overall, their suggestions offer a writer much more freedom to compose an original work. Even if it is only an e-mail, the lessons contained in the classic style guide could still easily hold up in electronic writing.
Similarity in Classical and Electronic Writing
It should be emphasized that the books are not polar opposites. They do have many things in common. Booher focuses on e-mail, which is designed to save time, which is essentially the theme of her message. Both guides suggest eliminating unnecessary words, which waste the reader’s time and the writer’s. Also, using positives in place of negatives for basically the same reason.
Strunk and White probably didn’t give much thought to time; it just was not the commodity in the 1930s that it has become today. The last half of the twentieth century introduced a whole new lifestyle where time went from valued to almost priceless.
They respectively belong to two very different genres; as long as the writer employs them in the proper context, each book serves its purpose as an effective guide, and perhaps most effectively could be combined to form a concise, yet grammatically correct modern composition.
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