Comparing Strunk and White with Williams

Strunk and White and Joseph Williams, both provided us with useful techniques of writing. It can be hard to know what is right, when you write because so many people have different opinions of "good" writing. Both of these authors have influenced my writing in different ways.

Strunk and White focused more on the words that are appropriate and inappropriate for writing. In my first blog assignment, I wrote about rules that I were not aware of in writing. For example, the word"funny" is not a good word to use when introducing your essay or topic. Strunk and White writes, "Also to be avoided in introduction is the word funny. Nothing becomes funny by being labeled so."(Strunk and White 50). Although "funny" is a word that I do not often use in papers, I was unaware of the fact that it should not be used in introductions. The word that surprised me the most was "irregardless," this a word that I hear people use everyday, but come to find out, it is not even a word. Strunk and White's explanation made me fully understand why it is not a word. It is a word that had double negatives. Although, Strunk and White focused more on the words in an essay, Williams' focuses more on the order or word grouping in an essay.

When reading Williams' 'Style,' I could see how it related to Strunk and White's. In chapter five of Williams' "Style" , he says " A reader will feel that a reader is cohesive if it has other strings of related words, strings that we call thematic strings. (Williams 83). Rule twenty of Strunk and White also touches on this subject. "Keep related words together" (Strunk and White 28.) Another example of how these readings relate to each other is found in chapter seven of Williams, "Simple Sources of Wordiness." (Williams 116). This rule involves getting rid of unnecessary words. Although Strunk and White do no have a rule based on getting rid of unnecessary words, most of the rules involve leaving unnecessary words out. In reading the last chapters of Williams' "Style", I found that these chapters related to some of the first five chapters.


Chapter Seven of "Style" discusses "Simple Sources of Wordiness." In my last blog assignment, I used an example that also could have also been used with this rule. In one of my examples, I felt that the word "just" should have been left out of the sentence. The word seemed unnecessary in the sentence and without it, the sentence seemed to flow better. Both of these readings had different views of writing,but they seem to be based on some of the same topics. I found both of them useful in different ways.

The advice offered by Williams was more useful to me with my writings because it went more into depth about different topics and how we understand them in papers. Williams' not only used one explanation, but he used every possible way to read a para graph or a sentence. By reading his rules or explanations, I was able to find one that I could relate to; and in the process, I could make the proper revisions.

Strunk and White was more effective to my writings because they focus more on correct word usage and the proper ways of writing. I found this more effective because at times I struggle with the correct word usage. At the same time, many of these rules related to Willliams' . In conclusion, I think that Strunk and White was easier to understand and more beneficial to my writings.