Friday, July 22, 2016

Strunk and White fashion

From Grant Snider’s Incidental Comics : Strunk and White’s Writers Style Guide.

This guide is a loose and witty translation of bits of advice from The Elements of Style . The active/passive panel doesn’t attempt to illustrate the difference between the active and passive voices. Only one panel quotes directly from The Elements : “Use figures of speech sparingly.” I especially like that panel.

Thanks, Steven, for pointing me to this work.

Related reading
All OCA Strunk and White posts (Pinboard)

[The title really should be Writer’s Style Guide, or Writers’ Style Guide .]

comments: 4

shallnot said...

Hello Michael,

I don't come up with "cryptic" crossword clues often but your observation regarding the lack of apostrophe in "Writers" caused the following to spring almost fully formed to mind:

"Apostrophe contains the seeds of its demise, we hear." (7 letters)

Answer (in ROT11--use rot13.com to decode): leczasj

Steven

Michael Leddy said...

I got it, which means it’s a good clue. :)

ROT15 (not 11) reveals the answer.

shallnot said...

I'm so used to using ROT13 that I forgot it is symmetrical thus you can use it to both encode and decode.

It makes sense that ROT11 encoded my answer but ROT15 is needed to decode. Sorry for any confusion.

Michael Leddy said...

Now I understand — the encoding and decoding always move forward. I’ll have to remember the site. Encoding would be a nice way to post, say, the punchline to a joke without revealing it.