After reading the book The Elements of Style, I felt like I had read this before. I believe throughout the two Linguistics classes that I have taken, most of the articles and readings stem from this book. It was all familiar to me in some sense or another.
The two rules that I benefited the most from is Rule 13: Omit needless words, and Rule 9: Make the Paragraph the unit of composition. I believe that Rule 13 applies to a lot of people, especially those who are untrained writers. I can relate to Strunk's statement :
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary
sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines,
and no machine no unnecessary parts.
At times I tend to put in extra words that really are not needed to get the same point across. Many folks, I believe, think that by putting in those extra words spice up their writings and make it more powerful. Contrary to that belief those extra words can hold up a sentence and perhaps turn off the reader by not allowing them to relate to the sentence because of those extra words.
In my case Rule 9 is very poignant because I have a terrible time constructing paragraphs. Most of the time I ramble on about things that don't belong in that particular paragraph. I don't make the original thesis statement of the paragraph and stick with that particular subject throughout the paragraph.
The rule in which I benefited least from was Rule 11: Put statements in a positive form. This was just boring to me. At times I thought the sentences used for examples were best left how they were. I am not sure I 100 percent disagree with this rule, but I tend to think that how we write is how we would say things. And by changing those words and putting them into a positive form may change the entire meaning itself.
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