50-year-old "Style" relevant to 21st century tech writing

The Wall Street Journal has a paean to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, published 50 years ago. That slim book remains the best, most accessible guide to writing, providing invaluable advice to writers hoping to convey clear, concise general as well as technical or business information.

Writing in the Journal, Mark Garvey, the author of Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, published this month, wonders what Strunk and White might make of the modes of writing available to us now. He writes, “A friend of mine suggests that as soon as they got a close look at the current situation–the flurry of texting, tweeting, IMing and Facebook chatting, much of it speed-thumbed while steering with the forearms–Strunk and White’s next move would be to form a suicide pact.”

Garvey is doubtful. He quotes White’s stepson, The New Yorker writer Roger Angell, writing in the foreword to the current edition of The Elements of Style, as suggesting Strunk and White would be tolerant of the “… rules-free, lower-case flow that keeps us cheerfully in touch these days.”

Garvey notes that “The young, and those who wish to appear so, have always roped off sections of the language for their own use, speaking and writing in ways that can seem runic and needlessly opaque to outsiders.” It’s not just the young–it’s electrical engineers as well. And that’s fine. Any group, whether defined by age or profession or area of expertise, will develop its own dialect that outsiders won’t understand.

If you are writing about quadrature amplitude modulation and error-vector-magnitude measurement, you’re writing for a select group of people, and you’re not going to be understood by outsiders, no matter how closely you adhere to Strunk and White’s guidelines. What’s important is to make sure the insiders you’re attempting to reach do understand you. The Elements of Style remains a valuable guide to ensuring that happens.

Related:

–In “Don’t yield to computer-aided thinking,” I ponder a grammar-checking computer program that might embody the knowledge of The Elements of Style and produce a critique that might have been written by E B White himself.

–Tony Taylor and Robert Ruiz paid homage to the classic writing guide with the headline of this technical article from 2001.

Note: I’m writing this early Saturday morning as I get ready to head out to VISION 2009 and Productronica. Any stylistic or usage errors are the result of fatigue, not reliance on Strunk and White. Perhaps I’ll see you in Stuttgart or Munich. If you are on the way to Austin for the International Test Conference, be on the lookout for Ron Wilson, who will be covering the ITC for both Test & Measurement World and EDN.