“Vigorous writing is concise. 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 a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
It is very hard to add any information about “the little book” — a widely known reference — without writing both too much and too little. Too much because Strunk —a man with “self-confidence” according to the famous American essayist E.B. White — warns prophetically: “omit needless words” and also “make definite assertions”; and when he says it, we feel compelled to obey. It is not only about making it short, but about making it count: conciseness is also a rhetorical weapon. Too little, because the book is invaluable and tempts us to go against its very advice and dedicate some prolix poetical lines about its saving power: it does save one from the “dark wood” —wild, rough and stubborn— in which the straight way is lost, in the middle of the journey of our writing life. Strunk is no Virgil, though. He is no poet. But you can approach his book with hope, and, even though quite “old,” it is still a precious resource of guidance to which one returns again and again.
